260729 – Jehovah’s Witness Origin and Doctrine vs Historic Christianity

by Thomas Abshier | Jul 29, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Rena

260728 – The Great Commission

by Thomas Abshier | Jul 28, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Developing the Courage and Certainty to Evangelize

Why the Sects Out-Evangelize the Church

Christos Fellowship — Renaissance Ministries

Fellowship Essay · 28 July 2026

Preface: Context

Charlie and I had a conversation this week about the future of Renaissance Ministries and how to create an effective ministry template that leaves time for living life. Charlie was born a Catholic, was part of the LDS church for many years, went on a mission as a teen, and was married in the temple. He eventually left the LDS version of Christianity for the Historic Christian faith. One of the things he has repeatedly said was how much time he spent doing LDS activities. He was a willing servant, and the church gave him so much LDS work that his life had little room for anything else. I relate this story as a caution. We must decide how much organization and outreach we should do to spread the message of Renaissance Ministries as we become larger and more widely known. That said, I think sharing the gospel is vital; all the methods of outreach that are so effectively done by the JW and LDS are options. What kind of outreach should we do? As a proposal, I think duplicating and multiplying the small group meeting concept is a good foundation. It could include the following: Zoom or home meetings; inviting new people but limiting to an agreed-upon limit so that everyone has the opportunity to share, grow and learn together. The discussion today is about what types of evangelization should be done. How do we get the word out so that the whole world can participate and reach the depth of personal challenge we have experienced in these interactions?

I. The Facts of Evangelization by Christians

Let’s begin with a few facts: the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Latter-day Saints go door to door witnessing, and the LDS send their young people out for two years at their own expense. I have received a number of handwritten letters — two pages, in cursive — from people in this town I have never met, who believe that Jehovah of the Bible is God the Father, that Jesus was the Archangel Michael and not God, and enclose a tract. I spent 26 weeks, an hour a week, on Zoom going through the JW program of introduction to Biblical concepts with a wonderful couple who dressed up nicely for the meeting and were polite and friendly. It was an enjoyable time of fellowship and studying the Word. During that study, there was little I could identify as distinct from their teachings and those of Historic Christianity. To identify the distinction between the doctrine of the JW and Historic Christianity requires careful parsing of the scriptures and history of these two Christian traditions. Here is an analysis of the JW history and doctrine.

The one obvious difference is the level of average commitment to (boldness in) evangelization by the LDS/JW and Historic Christianity adherents. Most of us in the body of Historic Christianity will not raise the subject of salvation and a relationship with God with a neighbor we have known for decades. Very few of us spend an hour a week explaining the Bible to a potential convert. The question is then, “Should we?” The answer is, yes, I think we should.

An explanation for this difference may be that we, as Historic Christians, don’t want to risk alienation in a culture that values diversity/tolerance as a primary virtue, has touted separation of Church and State as though it was a Constitutional principle (it is not), we have been told that American is not just a Christian nation (by Barack Obama), and that America’s strength is in its diversity (by woke culture).

Those reasons are probably part of why we are so non-evangelical in comparison, but I think there is a deeper reason. I think there are two reasons the JW and LDS sects are bold. 1) They believe what they are preaching, and 2) evangelism is integral to their institutional structure (doctrine, leadership, and history). My experience with both JW and LDS adherents is that they are deeply convinced that what they believe is true, and they believe they are doing me an invaluable service by telling me about their version of Christianity.

I believe many Christians are hesitant to witness because they are not certain that they can justify their belief in the Bible against the evidence and theories of science.

It seems that the JW and LDS adherents are not concerned about arguing with or comparing their beliefs with science. They probably don’t convert many secular humanists and materialists, but I don’t know that for certain. They believe their scriptures (the JW version of the Bible and the LDS Book of Mormon) are the correct words of God, and they need no justification beyond that to share the gospel as they understand it. They are true believers and do not let arguments against Scripture or the evidence and theories of Science discourage or dissuade them from sharing and defending their beliefs.

In my experience, they speak as a man does when he is certain that what he speaks, has read, and has been told is true. I see in them no wavering, no hint of uncertainty, no room for doubt in their presentation. I do not know if they have secret questions in their hearts. I am certain that some do, given that some leave these groups.  Given this evidence, we know there is a spectrum of belief and certainty in their book, prophecies, and leadership. And while the individual may have questions in private, those doubts are never shared in public or during the witnessing and evangelization encounters. Whether that is simplistic, a strategy, or the product of pressure from leadership is unknown.

I don’t see the specifics of their organizational formality in the LDS or JW scriptures. I suspect that each tradition has developed its own culture from a combination of the leadership, community response (what worked), and interpretation of its scriptures. All organizations act like people, to a greater or lesser extent, on various traits (because they are made of people). They have a drive to survive. The bottom line is that they have evolved and survived. This is proof that their methods are effective in producing survival, not that their doctrine is true. They speak in a way that reflects certainty; they use logic that is consistent to a point and to a depth that is adequate to convince a certain spectrum of the population. The result is that a certain percentage of people will respond to that presentation. As people, we are sheep, and we will follow the most persuasive shepherd.

The shepherd we follow may be the shepherd of rational philosophy or experimental science. It may be the shepherd telling of the wonderful changes in their lives, the fulfillment of Christian fellowship, or the sense of meaning. It may be the shepherd telling the story of the Bible and its promises of salvation and restoration with God. Regardless, as humans, we all follow others, at least to some extent. None of us is an island, independently inventing and validating all morality, symbolism, metaphysics, ontology, culture, and methodology.

II. Why We Are Quiet

Consider what a Christian actually faces when he opens his mouth in this culture. The Biblical literalist claims the world was created 6000 years ago, but the Scientific Establishment claims the universe is 13.8 billion years old. The Bible says there was a flood, and the geologist says there is no such geological record. The Bible says God made the world in six days, and scientists say the Big Bang began the process out of nothing, and the Earth was formed 4 billion years ago.

I am not concerned by any of these apparent contradictions. I think the language of the Bible is sufficiently inclusive/ambiguous to allow for any length of time for the Earth to form and life to arise, however God created it. To my mind, the actual point of tension is that the Bible states, “Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” (John 14:6) In a culture whose central moral conviction is that there is no ultimate truth, no one may claim to be right, evil is relative, and right and wrong are in the eye of the beholder, any behavior is permissible by adult parties in a willing contract. This single verse requires the Bible-believing Christian to make a statement which marks him as an exclusionist when he says there is only one way to God. This is a claim that makes everyone wrong, lost, and going to hell except the Christian. That type of stand does not sound like someone who is trying to find common ground to build a relationship on. This is the problem of “What about the pygmies, the people who are good people who never heard?” I think we need to confront that one right up front and admit that we don’t know how God deals justly with the person who has never heard, but I think we can trust that He will be fair with every person. To dwell on such questions is a type of avoidance; the reality is that it takes discipline to choose a life of righteousness, and we may need a miraculous change of heart to actually live it. The bottom line is really, will the person we are witnessing to live a better life if he submits to His Way? And, will a life committed to living His Way produce the best possible life for you/me/us?

How bold should we be in our witness? Should we speak or just let our excellent, loving life speak for itself? What should our posture be toward those to whom we are sharing the gospel? Should we go door to door? Should we sit in front of the DMV with a brochure holder full of tracts? Should we write letters to complete strangers?

The foundation of every Christian’s faith depends on a belief in the divine revelation of the Bible.  (My definition of the word “belief” is the state of mind that holds a concept so strongly that a man acts upon it.) We could defend our faith with a terse confession of the Bible’s inerrant authority with a statement such as, “the Bible said it, so I believe it.” But that isn’t a sufficiently complete elaboration of why people come to faith. People do not accept the Bible as the authoritative Word of God without corroborating evidence. There are many reasons that people believe the Bible. These include: its correspondence with history and contemporary documents, archaeological evidence, the evidence of the change in people’s lives, the familial tradition and teaching of the faith, the evidence of science, such as the fine-tuning argument, and the evidence of a God in nature and the resonance of the heart.

Such reasons are significant, in that they satisfy the mind and heart and spirit to a degree, but they cannot meet the standards of scientific reproducibility or explain why the atonement is necessary (the simple mechanistic reduction – the mechanio reducto).  And that is the crux: the culture we speak to has been trained to ask for the mechanism. The Bible does not offer a detailed causal explanation of the construction of the universe that would make it necessary for the literal Son of God, who is God Himself, to incarnate, live a perfect life, be falsely condemned and killed, rise again, and by doing so pay for my sins if I acknowledge His payment for my sins with His death, and commit my life to living as He lived.

The Bible is a revelation, which should be consistent with facts. The problem is that we cannot determine for certain that it is true from its own testimony. In fact, the story actually does not have enough detail to verify it by understanding and logic. This appears to be intentional,

• (1 Corinthians 2:14) — Spiritual things seem confusing: “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him… neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”
• (2 Corinthians 4:3–4) — The gospel is veiled: “If our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost… the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not.”
• (Matthew 13:11–13) — Jesus says the mysteries are hidden: “It is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.”
• (Isaiah 29:10–14) — A spirit of deep sleep: “The LORD hath poured out upon you the spirit of deep sleep… the vision of all is become unto you as the words of a book that is sealed.”
• (Romans 1:21–22) — Minds become darkened: “Their foolish heart was darkened… professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”

The apologist for Science believes he has an explanation for the existence of the universe to a great extent (knowing that he does not know the deepest mysteries). He points to relativity, natural selection, and the chain of physical causation running from the Big Bang to the present as evidence of the depth of scientific knowledge. The apologist for science believes he is standing on firm ground, as he bases his opinions on experiments, logic, and mechanism, which reflect objective reality. The Scientist believes his Christian friend is standing on ancient mythology that has been long disproven.

We are not silent because we lack courage. We are silent because we have been made to feel that we lack grounds.

III. The Priesthood Nobody Voted For

I believe we should challenge the conventional scientific doctrine and see to what degree it is valid, and where the edge of its uncertainty is. First, we ask what the materialist actually proposes. While doctrine varies within any religion, some common beliefs are: Matter existed eternally, uncaused. Matter organized itself. Matter produced life without intending to, and then produced mind — the very faculty now being used to explain matter — with no one directing any of it. I believe such an explanation for life and existence asks for more faith than Genesis does. It is appropriate to articulate the counterarguments against the certainty of Scientism.

The structure of science is not explanatory; it is a collection of experiments and facts with explanations that are not consistent with one another. There is one theory for particles and mass and another for fields and energy. Space and time are a mystery. Relativity explains the large, and quantum mechanics explains the small, and the equations describing the two are incompatible, and a century of effort has not joined them. Science is not a cathedral; it is a construction site. Science has constructed a theory of the universe and its implied morality. The fact is that the edifice of science is a hodgepodge of theory and experiment with no unified logic to justify its claim to truth.

I believe this realization relocates the burden. As Historic Christians, we have been made to feel like defendants by the apologists for science. But when we examine the foundations of science, we see that it is also a system of faith. We hold that the Bible implies God by the evidence of the revelation. Science holds that there is no God, based on the evidence of experiment, which does not provide a logical proof.

But there is something more going on here than a disagreement about evidence and theory. Physicists have become the de facto priesthood of this age. They have been given the authority to tell us what is real and the implications of that revelation. They are consulted on origins, on ends, on the nature of the human person. Their pronouncements arrive with the authority that once attached to a bishop’s. The problem is that the nature of humanity is similar to that of the sheep.  We follow leaders because we do not know the end from the evidence of the moment. We follow those who present themselves with certainty. We cannot know everything, so we follow those who understand things that we do not know. The problem is that our leaders are blind guides. (Matthew 15:14) “They be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.”

A generation is being led by shepherds who do not believe in the good Shepherd. They are not wicked men. Most are careful and honest within their domain. But they are answering questions their instruments cannot reach, and the flock cannot tell the difference between questions the scientists have rightfully answered and those which are extrapolated, but unjustified by the logic of the causal chain they have derived.

This is why the physics matters to me, and why I have spent forty years on it. Not because the world needs another theory. Because the scientist-philosophers who have attempted to declare the nature of reality from the interpretation of their experiments have given their evidence credit for more explanatory power than it deserves. The Conscious Point Physics and the associated Theory of the Atonement do not prove God or the Gospel, but they do provide a plausible, logical, and unified explanatory connection between the Bible and the experimental evidence of science. I am hoping that the cause-effect arguments are small enough and well enough substantiated to at least not be dismissed as pious noise.

IV. What the Argument Can and Cannot Do

I don’t want to overpromise, since my argument is not without gaps in evidence and theory. What it does provide is a plausible sequence of causal forces that give what has been completely missing for the person who wishes to share the gospel with those who are blinded by science. It gives an argument, even if incomplete, that is like a series of stepping stones across a wide river, allowing a crossing of a vast distance in small jumps.

We now have a chain of premises for the atonement — twelve of them, ending in a conclusion that follows if the premises hold. It answers a question I have been asked all my life and never been able to answer: not that Christ died for us, but how that death reaches across two thousand years and touches me.

While the 12 Postulates and the argument leading to the conclusion are not a proof, at least they provide a pathway for the searcher to justify why God does not make Himself obvious by preventing every illness, accident, crime, and reversal. God veils Himself precisely so that agreement with and adoption of His Way is not compelled. A demonstrated God would coerce like gravity coerces a falling stone, and coerced love is not love. The whole architecture of creation, as I understand it, exists to keep a genuine choice genuinely open for us to choose God’s love. I cannot prove the necessity of the Savior with absolute certainty, and that is for the same reason that I have claimed that God has created the universe. To make such a claim is to violate the reason for which the creation exists. It can only point in the direction of truth. I cannot locate it, identify it, and prove that it is the truth. Nevertheless, I can make that final act of faith, giving one’s life to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, as the culmination of a series of small steps, rather than one large step that seems impassable at first consideration.

I believe the argument is logical and valid, but it rests upon premises that remain open to challenge. Grant them, and the conclusion follows necessarily. But the premises are argued, not revealed, and a reasonable person may decline one or more. This is where faith is required. More derivation and justification of the premises can be pursued endlessly. At some point, all arguments rest on axiomatic assumptions, on evidence that cannot be proven. This is true of conventional science, and it is true of Conscious Point Physics, and it is true of accepting the directive of the Bible and the metaphysical axioms assumed by the argument justifying the atonement.

Christ said the cross would be a stumbling block, and He meant it as a permanent feature, not a temporary defect awaiting better apologetics. Our aim is not to remove the stone. Our aim is to make it a pebble — something a man may still trip over, but one which he can now step across if he is willing to have the faith of a mustard seed. That is all, and it is enough.

V. The Danger That Sits Inside the Ambition

A friend told me of a dream. He was attempting to communicate about an invention. He had the invention documented on graph paper — several sheets, each ruled to a different scale. Anyone who has used graph paper knows the problem: without a legend telling you the size one square represents, it cannot be converted into reality. Large things can be perceived as small, and the small made to appear large. In the dream, there was no legend, and he could not properly communicate the invention. Upon awaking, he understood it: We cannot communicate and come to a mutual understanding unless we are using the same standard. If we are using different scales, then we must have a way of converting them from one to the other.

This is a description of what we face in the realm of witnessing to our fellow man. We must in some way convert the standards of the Bible to the standards of Science. Until we have that legend, that conversion table available, it will be impossible for these two groups of designers to communicate in a way that bridges the gap between the logic of the gospel and the logical evidence of science.  What appears to be two factions disagreeing about a conclusion is two worldviews that need a way to connect them so they can show that they are both describing the same creation.

My friend told me about a situation in his life that served as a useful analogy to our relationship with God. He was at a church gymnasium many years ago. He asked his young daughter to take her little sister for a drink of water. The girl turned to her stepfather to ask permission. The stepfather refused. My friend was hurt and said to God: I am her father, and she is listening to strangers. The answer came back: My children do that to me all the time. I am their Father, and they listen to strangers.

There are many voices in this world, and one of them is our Father God speaking to us.  Whatever stands between the Father and His children must be identified, and we must choose to listen to Him. When a man’s words are elevated above the words of God, the children start checking with him before they will act on what their Father has said. The intermediary need not be malicious. He need only be consulted first.

This is my standing caution that I express to my Latter-day Saint friends. Not that they are unsaved. My caution is narrower, and I am concerned that they are not living in the freedom of Christ. The Book of Mormon may or may not be of divine origin; I cannot say which is true with certainty. I am concerned by the caution of the Revelation to John that says, “If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book.” “And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life…” (Revelation 22:18-19)

I do know the Book of Mormon was delivered by a man, just as the Bible was. But the Bible was inspired by God over 4 millennia, and many authors, all speaking with one voice. Such filtering removes the dogmatism of a single perspective. I know the claims of divinity and uncorrupted lineage of these later-day revelations (Muhammad, Joseph Smith, and Russel). To the extent that there is no disagreement with the BIble, I take all claimed prophecy and literature as additional perspectives on life. It may even be a divine perspective. But to the extent that any word disagrees, the Bible should take precedence. The more tangible concern is that the organization that has arisen around the Book of Mormon has a President who is called the prophet and whose word is taken as the word of God. Such doctrine allows the word of men to be inserted into the word of God, and given superiority over it.

The danger is that the gospel of grace in the Bible can have additional conditions of salvation attached to it. The result can be man laboring endlessly at things that were never asked of him. Works become attached to salvation rather than sanctification. In effect, it is the story of the child coming to another father before our Heavenly Father. This can lead to bondage. It is not damnation, but it is not the liberty in Christ that we were promised. “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” (1 Timothy 2:5)

VI. The Same Knife, Turned Toward Me

Everything I have just said applies to me.

I am building a framework. I am hoping it will be evangelistic. Bill Bright, in the 60s and 70s, created Campus Crusade for Christ and had four spiritual laws. I have developed an apologetic with twelve premises and nine axioms. I believe they tell a deeper story that makes it easier to accept that the Bible may be true, but it is the story about the real story, the Bible. I don’t want to become a Mary Baker Eddy, Russell, or Joseph Smith. I just want to make it easier to believe the Bible is God’s word.

I do not want this or future generations to take my words and treat them as Scripture. If this theory becomes widely known, people may quote the premise chain or CPP axioms. This is fine. It’s just one man’s opinion. Everyone’s opinion deserves consideration to the extent that it helps make the Word of God, the Bible, more accessible and understandable. Many men have done the same: Armstrong, Campbell, Schofield, Finney, Calvin, Luther, etc.  All have illuminated some aspect of Scripture, but none are worthy of being its replacement. The same is true of my work. I do not have a final proof of God’s existence, or that Jesus is the Way to the Father, but I believe my argument, if followed, will make it easier for the modern scientific man to accept that the Words of the Bible are reasonable, and justify making Jesus the lord of one’s life.

I am pointing at Christ. That is all. My words are not the words of God; they are the words of a man who needed help understanding the words of God, and who wrote down what helped him. If the framework assists you, use it. If it becomes a substitute, then put it down and study the Bible, and put my words in their proper place, as support, not replacement.

The test is the same for any book or teacher. Does it send people to Scripture, or does it substitute for Scripture? Does a man leave the argument more able to read his Bible, or more dependent on my explanation of it?

VII. What We Are Actually Commissioned To Do

One further thought, a realization I had during our last fellowship meeting. We read the Great Commission as a command to baptize with water. But look at what it says: “And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.” (Matthew 28:18-20) Perhaps the command was not about baptizing in water, but baptizing in the Name. Baptism means immersion. Perhaps we are being told to immerse people in the Name itself: the nature, the essence, the character of God.

Perhaps the water is a symbol of the all-encompassing presence of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Putting a man under water pictures the level of immersion in God that we should live inside of. The name, nature, and presence of God, Son, and Holy Spirit should fully envelop us so much that it becomes the medium we move in. We are told of John the Baptist, “John answered, saying unto them all, I indeed baptize you with water; but one mightier than I cometh, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.” (Luke 3:16) If we are promoting baptism in water as the goal, we are advocating for the same weaker version of baptism that John the Baptist said was inferior to what Jesus Christ was bringing. I think we should be preaching, teaching, and evangelizing for the greater, the more powerful, the more effective, and life-transforming immersion in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

If that reading holds, it reorganizes what we should be doing when we witness and evangelize. The task is not primarily to secure a decision to say the Sinner’s prayer or baptize in water. I think such a decision and symbolism are of great importance. Rather, I believe we should be focusing on the Great Commission’s clear command to go into all nations and encourage a person to immerse himself in the character of God until he is living in it. The argument clears an obstacle. The framework makes the stumbling block a pebble. But no one is saved by a premise chain, and the work is not finished when a man says he is persuaded. The work is ongoing sanctification, developing character, and serving our fellow man.

Which returns us to the two commandments upon which all is based. “Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Mathew 22:37-40) Everything else — the physics, the premises, the essays, the ministries — is support work. Useful work, but support work.

VIII. Readiness

There is a last question, and it is one of timing.

I have been told that it is time to make this public, to film the testimony, to build the channel, to put it where it can find whoever it was meant for. We are doing that to a small extent now with the website and fellowship meeting notifications. I do not intend to keep this message low profile or private until it is perfect.  There may well be a particular sort of person for whom this particular account is the method/argument that opens the door. I don’t think it will reach everyone, because even Jesus was not properly understood by Judas. The point is that it may reach some.  We each have to do the same, witnessing with whatever tools, analogies, and testimonies are at our disposal. The work is not perfect nor complete, and the infrastructure of support is not fully installed.

One of the important steps to take in the development of this program is the progression, the lesson plan, the gradient between elementary and more complex applications of the scripture in daily life.  The message is public now on the web, and a number of people receive the weekly invitation to the Fellowship meeting. My goal is for many people to meet in their own groups to study scripture, consider these essays, to share their insights, to work toward changing their hearts to be like Him. “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2) It is our job to share the gospel, and enroll people in full immersion in Him.

The other side of this effort is to not put your hand to the plow until you are ready. Christ waited thirty years. Thirty years of obscurity for three of ministry. “And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:62)

So the work continues: making it coherent, making it teachable, making it duplicable without my presence. For now, the summary of where we stand is this: We have a diagnosis of why the church is quiet (a fear of the culture and the authority of science). We have an argument that meets the culture on the ground it has chosen (the 12 Premises and the 9 Axioms). We have a discipline against the argument becoming proud and replacing a modern interpretation (the Bible is always the standard, not any modern prophets, revelations, or interpretations). And we have a commission to bring people into a life fully immersed in God.

That is the goal. We are making progress toward developing a coherent and more complete exposition of the questions that are stumbling blocks, moral dilemmas, and the unknown.

Thomas

Questions for Discussion

1. Is the diagnosis right? Are we quiet from embarrassment about grounds, or is something else going on — fear of relationship damage, simple disobedience, or a culture that has made all persuasion feel like aggression?
2. On the priesthood. If most belief is formed by trusting a shepherd rather than by personal verification, is that a defect to be corrected or simply how creatures learn? What follows for how we teach?
3. On the pebble. Where exactly is the line between an argument that clears an obstacle and an argument that compels? Can we tell when we have crossed it?
4. The mediator test. Apply it honestly to this fellowship: does what we produce send people to Scripture or substitute for it? What would the warning signs look like, and who is willing to say so?
5. On our LDS friends. Is bondage-not-damnation the right reading? What do we actually owe people we love who are, on our account, saved but not free — and what does love require that condemnation does not?
6. On baptism in the Name. If the commission is immersion in the character of God rather than in water, what does that change about how we would go about it this week?

“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” — Matthew 28:19

“He must increase, but I must decrease.” — John 3:30

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King. 1 Chronicles 12:38

260725 – Reconciliation of Man with the Father

by Thomas Abshier | Jul 25, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Necessity of the Son

A Deductive Argument from the Holiness of God to the Cross

Christos Fellowship — Renaissance Ministries

Fellowship Essay – 25 July 2026

premise_chain_handout

Preface: What This Essay Claims and What It Does Not

The rule established in the preceding essays holds here without modification. The fact of the atonement is Register 1: certain, settled, not under revision. That Christ died for our sins, that He rose, that by Him we are reconciled to the Father — this is bedrock, and no argument below is offered as its support. Scripture does not require my reasoning in order to be true.

The mechanism is Register 3: hypothesis. What follows is an attempt to show that if certain premises hold — premises drawn from Scripture, from the observable structure of the world, and from a small number of frankly speculative postulates about the nature of God — then the atonement is not an arbitrary arrangement God happened to choose, but the only available solution to a genuine structural problem. The argument’s ambition is modest in one sense and large in another. It cannot prove the gospel. It can, if it succeeds, show that the gospel is what a coherent world would require.

The essay proceeds deductively. Premises are numbered so that any reader who wishes to reject the conclusion may locate precisely which premise he denies. That is the point of arguing this way: it makes disagreement productive rather than merely oppositional.

Part I — The Scriptural Datum: Separation Is Real and Operative

Before any speculation, a foundation must be laid in what Scripture plainly teaches. The claim to be established is narrow but essential: separation between God and sin is not a metaphor for divine disapproval. It is a real, operative condition with real consequences.

Six passages carry the weight.

Isaiah 59:2 is the clearest statement of the mechanism: “But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear.” Note the direction of causation. God is not described as withdrawing in offense. The iniquity itself does the separating; the sin itself hides the face. This is the grammar of a barrier, not of a mood.

Habakkuk 1:13 requires careful handling. The verse reads: “Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity: wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is more righteous than he?”

The verse is not a flat proposition. It is the opening of a prophetic complaint, and the second half of it is a scandalized question. But observe why the question is scandalized. Habakkuk can build his complaint on the premise that God cannot look upon iniquity only because that premise is so utterly settled in Israel’s understanding of God that it can serve as the unquestioned ground of an accusation. The prophet is not arguing for divine purity; he is assuming it, and finding God’s apparent tolerance of the treacherous unbearable in light of it.

This is stronger evidence than a bare assertion would be. And it points directly at the problem this essay exists to solve. Habakkuk’s question — how can a God who cannot look on iniquity be looking at this? — is precisely the right question. The answer this essay proposes is that the iniquity is shielded, and that settlement is deferred. Paul says exactly this: God set forth Christ as a propitiation for sins that are past, through the forbearance of God (Romans 3:25). Forbearance is not indifference. It is deferred settlement against an account already underwritten. Habakkuk asks the question; the cross is the answer.

Genesis 3:22–24 gives the first instance: sin issues immediately in expulsion from the immediate presence. The pattern is established at the outset of the human story and never afterward reversed by any means but atonement.

Ezekiel 14:7 locates the agency in man: the one “which separateth himself from me, and setteth up his idols in his heart.” Man separates himself. The idol is erected in the heart, and the separation follows from the erection.

Romans 11:22 supplies the covenantal form — “otherwise thou also shalt be cut off” — establishing that the separation is not merely felt but structural, a severance of standing.

2 Thessalonians 1:9 gives the terminal case: everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power. The final state of the unreconciled is described spatially, in terms of exclusion from presence.

From these, four conclusions follow that the rest of the argument will use:

1. Separation from God is caused by sin, not by divine caprice.
2. It is initiated from man’s side, by man’s own act.
3. It is real and structural, not merely emotional.
4. It admits of a terminal, permanent form.

And one further datum, from the other side of the ledger: Ephesians 2:13 — “now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.” The separation is removable, and the means of its removal is specified.

Part II — The Lever: God’s Demonstrated Capability of Sequestration

The argument’s decisive move requires a further scriptural observation, and it is the one that makes everything else possible.

God does not merely tolerate separation. He performs it. He is demonstrably capable of taking a portion of what exists within His domain and placing it outside His fellowship while it yet continues to exist.

The angels who rebelled are the clearest case. They were not annihilated. They were sequestered — reserved in chains, held in a place prepared, permitted continued existence in a condition of exclusion (2 Peter 2:4; Jude 6; Matthew 25:41). The same operation appears in the final judgment: a place is prepared, and those who refuse are consigned to it. In every case the pattern is identical: continued existence, terminated fellowship.

This is the lever. If God possessed only the power to destroy what offends Him, the argument below could not run — evil would meet annihilation, and there would be no space in which a free creature could ever entertain it. But God possesses a subtler and more consequential power: the power to partition, to seal off a region within His own being and hold what is there at a distance from His unmediated presence, without ceasing to sustain its existence.

Everything that follows is an application of this single capability.

Part III — The Argument Proper

The Premises

P1 — God is self-existent. I AM THAT I AM (Exodus 3:14). He owes His being to nothing outside Himself. (Register 1.)

P2 — God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5). His nature is unmixed. (Register 1.)

P3 — God’s purity is constituted as an ongoing separation of light from dark. This is the essay’s first speculative postulate. On the hypothesis developed in the preceding essays, the ordered God is God allied wholly with the light — the One who, out of His own primal depth, refused all commerce with the inert and the dark and organized Himself into concentrated, wakeful consciousness. Purity, on this reading, is not a static attribute but an act perpetually maintained. (Register 3.)

The consequence of P3 is severe and must be stated plainly: if God’s very identity consists in the rejection of darkness, then admitting darkness into His unmediated presence is not merely distasteful to Him. It is self-annihilating. He would not be who He is. His being is at stake in His holiness. This is why the response to sin cannot be indulgence, and why Habakkuk’s premise is correct.

P4 — God is love (1 John 4:8). (Register 1.)

P5 — Love cannot be satisfied alone, nor by a compelled response. A love that cannot be withheld is not love; it is a mechanism wearing love’s face. Therefore the fulfillment of love requires an other capable of genuine refusal. (Register 1 in substance, reasoned in form.)

P6 — Therefore God brings forth genuine others, and ultimately a creation of free creatures, in order that love may be freely returned. (Follows from P4, P5.)

P7 — Genuine freedom to refuse requires real access to the alternative. A choice between the good and nothing is not a choice. The creature must be able to see, weigh, be drawn by, and elect the darkness — which is to say, the creature must exist in proximity to evil as a live option. (Reasoned.)

P8 — Moral disorder, once introduced, is conservative. It does not decay, and it will not anneal itself by the passage of time or the accumulation of later goods. A sinful act imprints the substrate and propagates; a subsequent good act, occurring later in time, cannot reach backward to cancel the earlier disturbance. Disorder is removed only by the injection of an exactly opposed, order-restoring pattern, and such injection is costly. (Register 3 in its physical form; Register 1 in its scriptural form — “the wages of sin is death,” and the whole sacrificial system presupposes that guilt requires discharge rather than fading.)

The Contradiction

From P3 and P7 a contradiction follows, and it is the engine of the entire argument.

• By P3, the Father’s presence cannot contain darkness.
• By P7, free creatures must be positioned where darkness is available to them.
• Therefore, free creatures cannot be positioned in the Father’s unmediated presence.

But by P6, free creatures must exist, or love goes unfulfilled. And by P1, there is nowhere outside God for them to be placed; nothing exists outside the self-existent One (“in him we live, and move, and have our being” — Acts 17:28).

The problem is now exactly stated. God requires creatures who can choose evil. God cannot abide evil in His presence. There is no “outside God” in which to put them. These three cannot be reconciled — unless there exists a way to make a region within God that is at once sustained by Him and shielded from His unmediated purity.

The Resolution

P9 — The capability of sequestration, established in Part II, is precisely the required operation. God can partition. He can hold a region within His own being at a remove from His unveiled presence while continuing to sustain it.

P10 — The partition is effected through the Son, who creates and holds the creation. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made (John 1:3). The Father does not create the physical order directly; the Son does. And the Son differs from the Father in exactly the respect the problem requires: the Son can look upon evil without immediately separating it from Himself. He can contain a domain in which darkness is a live option, sustaining it rather than expelling it.

This yields the answer to a question Scripture raises and does not explain: why the Son, and not the Father, is the Creator. On this hypothesis it is not an incidental division of labor. It is the solution to the contradiction. The Son is the interface — the shield — by which a holy Father may remain in relation to a world where evil is possible. And the shield was in place before there was any wound; the arrangement is not a repair improvised after the fall but the architecture of creation itself.

So the creation is within the Son, and the Son is with the Father, and the sin of the world is real but held — shielded, during the creature’s embodied life, from the Father’s direct and consuming regard. This is the standing answer to Habakkuk’s complaint.

Part IV — The Symmetry Requirement: Why the Sequestered World Must Be as Severe as the Father

Here the argument reaches its least obvious and most important step.

A sequestered domain could, in principle, have been built with lax rules — a nursery where wrongdoing carried no weight. But it was not, and it could not have been, for a reason that follows necessarily from the purpose of the arrangement.

The domain is not a permanent holding cell. It is a passage. Its inhabitants are intended to emerge from it into the Father’s presence. And the moment that is granted, the standard inside the domain is constrained by the standard at the exit.

P11 — The exit condition governs the internal law. If souls formed inside the sequestered creation are to pass out of it into the unveiled presence of a God who cannot abide darkness, then whatever emerges must be actually clean — not pardoned by a lower court whose judgments the higher court cannot recognize. Therefore the Son was required to construct a world whose treatment of evil is exactly as uncompromising as the Father’s own: a world in which sin genuinely incurs death, in which the disorder is genuinely conserved, in which the accounting is exact.

This explains the character of the law we actually find. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life is not primitive vengeance; it is the statement of exactness. The sentence must match the offense precisely, because an inexact settlement would leave residue, and residue cannot pass the gate. It also explains why the world is harsh — why consequences are real, why sin genuinely wounds, why the creation groans. A softer world would have been a crueler one, because it would have produced souls unfit to leave it.

So: the Son built a domain as severe toward evil as the Father is, and then stood as its gatekeeper. The severity is not a flaw in the design. It is the design’s fidelity to its purpose.

Part V — Why the Debt Cannot Be Self-Paid

Two independent arguments establish that no creature can discharge his own account.

The temporal argument follows from P8. The disturbance propagates from the moment of the act. A later good deed radiates from a later moment. The two never meet in phase; the wave has already left the shore. Restitution may settle a debt between persons — and should be pursued — but it does not reach the imprint made in the substance of the creation. Good works cannot cancel sin because they arrive too late, and they always arrive too late.

The magnitude argument follows from the exactness requirement of P11. The required payment for sin is death — not merely physical cessation but the full separation from the Father’s love and presence. A creature paying that penalty has expended himself and gained nothing; he has satisfied the debt at the cost of the existence the debt was meant to preserve. Self-payment is possible in principle and useless in fact. The one who pays this price cannot be the one who benefits from it — unless the payer can survive the payment.

Which requires someone who does not deserve it.

Part VI — Why Only the Incarnate Creator Could Generate the Remedy

P12 — The remedy must be generated inside the domain, by one who is both innocent and master of the domain.

Four conditions must be met simultaneously, and only one person in the structure can meet them all.

First, the remedy must be generated inside the created order. The disorder exists in this substrate; an exactly opposed pattern must be introduced into this same substrate. It cannot be imported from outside the system. Therefore the Creator had to enter His creation — not appear in it, but be genuinely embodied within it, subject to its law.

Second, the payer must be genuinely liable to death and yet not deserve it. A being who could not die could not pay; a being who deserved death would be paying his own account. The incarnate Son satisfies both: a real body, killable under the domain’s law, animated by a life that had incurred no sentence. He knew no sin (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Third, the death must be unjust — and here is the mechanism of the credit. In a world governed by exact accounting, where every sin demands a death, the reciprocal holds: every death demands a sin. Christ’s death entered the ledger as an effect with no cause, a debit with no corresponding debt. This is not a bookkeeping curiosity. In a domain whose justice is exact by construction, an unmerited death constitutes a standing credit within the substance of the creation — a payment made, awaiting an account to which it may be applied.

Fourth, the payer must survive to administer it. Death could not hold Him because there was no warrant against Him; the sentence found nothing in Him to grip. The resurrection is therefore not a receipt appended to a completed transaction but part of the machinery itself. A payment sealed inside a destroyed payer cancels nothing. A treasury requires a living treasurer; an acquittal requires a living Advocate — he ever liveth to make intercession for them (Hebrews 7:25).

The Critical Distinction

One clarification prevents this account from collapsing: the correction established in the July essay. What Christ bore was our liability, not our disharmony.

Scripture’s own grammar is precise: the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:6). Laid on — a burden set upon a bearer, not a stain contracted. This is the exact logic of the sacrificial system, in which the hand is pressed to the head of the animal, and the guilt transferred, while the animal itself must remain without blemish — for a lamb blemished by the transfer would be disqualified by the very act meant to make it useful.

So two things must be held apart. Intrinsic disharmony is the actual disorder in a soul, a property of the thing, and it is what wrath grips. Forensic liability is the standing to receive what that disorder has earned — a relation, freely assumed, not a contagion caught. Christ took the position of the debtor without taking the debtor’s corruption. The wrath coupled to the sin He held, not to the Man who held it. This is how the wrath could be total, and He could still rise.

The cost was therefore real but of a different kind than contamination. It was the agony of holding the entire disorder of the world at the precise point where disorder is answered. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me is not the cry of a man being made evil. It is the cry of a man holding evil, at the place where evil meets its answer.

And One Further Distinction

The cross generated the answer to every sentence; it did not execute every sentence.

Without this, the argument proves too much: if total wrath fell upon the whole world’s disorder, every account closed at Golgotha, and all are saved irrespective of will — which is not the gospel and cannot be reconciled with Scripture’s warnings. The resolution is that in a conservative order, a disharmony is canceled only when its exact inverse is brought into superposition with it. At the cross, the Son generated the exact inverse of the world’s whole disharmony, and the entire cost of its generation fell on Him. That inverse now exists, complete and sufficient. It cancels no particular sin until that particular sin is brought into phase with it.

The reservoir is finite in nature yet inexhaustible in supply: finite because it matches exactly the disorder it answers, inexhaustible because it is a pattern applied, not a stock drawn down. Canceling your sin does not consume what remains for mine. This is why He may administer it, soul by soul, world without end, and the treasury never falls.

Part VII — The Son as Gatekeeper: The Argument from Jurisdiction

We may now read one of Scripture’s hardest sayings as a structural statement rather than a merely sectarian one.

I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me (John 14:6).

On this account, the verse describes architecture before it describes religion. The reasoning is jurisdictional:

1. The debt was incurred inside a domain the Son created and sustains.
2. The law under which it was incurred is the law He established, in fidelity to the Father’s standard.
3. The payment that answers it was generated by Him, at His own cost, within that same domain.
4. The exit from that domain into the Father’s presence is therefore His to administer.

He is not an arbitrary tollgate. He is the only party with standing to discharge the obligation, because it is His system, His law, His payment, and His threshold. When a soul emerges from the shelter of embodiment and stands exposed to the Father’s unveiled regard, the Son either applies the credit of His unjust death to that account, or He does not — and there is no other office in the structure competent to do it.

This also explains what happens at that threshold. Only what is clean can pass. The debt discharged, the disorder canceled, what remains of the person is what was genuinely conformed to the light — the treasure laid up, the character actually formed. What was mere accommodation of the flesh does not survive the passage; it is not smuggled through but consumed. Every man’s work shall be made manifest… and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is (1 Corinthians 3:13).

Part VIII — Why Reception Is Required: The Logic of At-One-Ment

The final step is the one most often mistaken for arbitrariness, and it is in fact the most rigorously necessary of all.

Why must the remedy be received? Why does God not simply apply it universally and be done?

Because the entire structure exists to make free love possible, and an imposed remedy would destroy at the last moment the very thing the whole arrangement was built to obtain.

Follow the chain. Creation exists so that love may be freely given (P4–P6). Freedom requires real refusal (P7). The sequestered world exists to make that freedom survivable (P9–P10). Its severity exists to make its graduates fit to leave (P11). The remedy exists because the disorder freedom produced is conservative and costly to cancel (P8, P12). If, at the final step, the remedy were applied without consent, then the creature’s will would have been overridden precisely at the point where it mattered most — and God would have obtained, at infinite cost, exactly the puppet He declined to make at the beginning.

Therefore, reception is not a fee charged for grace. It is the last and highest expression of the freedom the whole creation was built to protect.

And note what reception consists of. It is alignment — bringing one’s own disorder into phase with the remedy, which requires acknowledging that the disorder is one’s own (confession), releasing the claim to it (repentance), and submitting to the order that will replace it (Lordship). That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved (Romans 10:9). This is not the recitation of a formula but the actual turning of a will.

Hence the word: at-one-ment. Not a transaction concluded at a distance but the making of two into one. The separation established by Isaiah 59:2 is closed by Ephesians 2:13. What sin partitioned, alignment with the Son rejoins.

And the refusal remains genuinely available. The disorder stays coupled to whoever bears it; every man shall bear his own burden (Galatians 6:5). Hell requires no geography on this account — it is the condition of a soul holding its own uncanceled disorder, in a domain from which there is nowhere outside God to be exiled. Not a sentence imposed from without but a state retained from within.

Part IX — The Conclusion Stated

The argument may now be set out in a single chain:

God is love, and love unreciprocated is unfulfilled → therefore free others must exist → freedom requires access to evil → but God’s own being consists in the rejection of evil, and there is nothing outside God → therefore a sequestered domain is required, which God is demonstrably able to make → the Son creates and sustains it, being able to look upon evil without expelling it → but its exit opens onto the Father, so its law must be as exact as the Father’s own → therefore sin genuinely incurs death and disorder is genuinely conserved → therefore no creature can pay his own account, being both too late and too small → therefore the remedy must be generated inside the domain by one innocent and sovereign within it → therefore the Creator incarnates, dies unjustly, and thereby establishes an exact credit in the substance of the creation → and rises, that a living Advocate may administer it → and administers it upon reception, because imposing it would destroy the freedom the whole structure exists to protect → and the one who receives it is made clean, and passes the gate, and is at one with the Father.

Therefore the Savior is not an accommodation. He is a necessity — the only possible bridge between a holiness that cannot tolerate darkness and a love that requires free creatures who can choose it.

The cross is not an arbitrary transaction. It is the costly, exact, and structurally required remedy that makes the continuation of a free, love-capable universe consistent with the purity of God. And the acceptance of that remedy is not a religious formality but the act by which a creature, freely and with open eyes, aligns himself with the order that alone can sustain him in the presence of the Father.

Part X — Objections, and the Limits of the Claim

Intellectual honesty requires that the weakest joints be named rather than concealed.

On the language of the Son’s origin. This essay has spoken of the Father “bringing forth” the Son and of the Son as the one through whom the Father acts. The stronger formulation used in the July essay — that the One who was alone divided His own perspective into Father and Son — is preferable to any language of the Son being created, and should be standardized. The distinction is not pedantic. The historic confession is that the Son is begotten, not made — eternally of the Father’s own being rather than the first of His products. Language suggesting the Son is a creature is the position the Church examined and rejected at Nicaea, and any essay of mine that appears to teach it will be read as teaching that whatever else it says. The argument here does not require it: everything above works, and works better, if the Father-Son distinction is an eternal self-distinction within the one God rather than a manufacture.

On the cosmogony. That God arose by stages from an undifferentiated depth is the most speculative element in the framework, and I have said before that the passage from nothing to something is indefensible. The distinction between priority of organization (an inner sequence within one being) and priority of being (owing existence to another) does real work in protecting the doctrine of divine aseity, but it is a repair applied to a strain, not the absence of strain. The main argument does not depend on it. If one holds simply that God is eternally light with no darkness in Him, every step from P3 onward survives intact. Readers who find the cosmogony unhelpful should discard it and keep the rest.

On “nothing exists outside God.” This is foundational to the framework and must be guarded carefully. It is panentheism — all things within God — and not pantheism: we are not God, do not become God, and do not share His perspective or authority. Acts 17:28 supports it. But the guard must be explicit every time it is asserted, because the distance between “in Him we have our being” and “we are divine” is short in most readers’ hearing.

On the framework’s relation to the tradition. The account developed here is closer to received theology than it may appear. The structure of exact satisfaction is essentially Anselmian. The distinction between borne liability and contracted disharmony recovers the classical separation of guilt from pollution which the Reformed tradition has long maintained. That an independent line of reasoning arrived at distinctions the tradition already possesses is evidence that the reasoning is tracking something real.

On the tension we have not resolved. The framework predicts nothing whatever about how many are finally saved. It describes how the remedy is made and how it is applied; it is silent on how many present themselves. That silence is honest, and the hope of a wider reconciliation is held here as hope and not preached as promise — for a promise of certain rescue, published and leaned upon, would remove the very reason a soul might set out.

Closing

We live in exactly the kind of world that would require a cross. That is the whole of the claim.

If the mechanism proposed here helps a doubting mind see why the sacrifice of Christ is reasonable rather than arbitrary, let it serve. If any part of it is wrong — and some part of it surely is — the cross stands unaffected. The reasoning is a crutch for those who need one, offered by a man who needed one. It is not the gospel.

The gospel is shorter, and it does not depend on me:

For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. — Romans 5:10

In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins. — Ephesians 1:7

But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. — Ephesians 2:13

And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say? — Luke 6:46

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King. 1 Chronicles 12:38

260719 – Recap – God, the Beginning, and the Atonement

by Thomas Abshier | Jul 21, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Evolution from Nothing, the Veil, and the Eternal Relationship

An Inquiry into Atonement, Freedom, and the Purpose of Creation

Christos Fellowship — Renaissance Ministries

Fellowship Essay · July 19, 2026

I. Introduction

The fellowship’s most recent gathering began with a discussion of the atonement and the questions it raises. How does the death and resurrection of Christ reconcile humanity to God? In particular, what is the nature of the universe that such an offering could be effective?

A satisfying answer requires a story that combines all aspects of life inclu, divine revelation interacting with physical forces and structures, patterns and facts of life, existence and the hypothetical origin of a God who has no beginning, the self-imposed limits and needs of God, man’s weakness and what he can offer God, the purpose of life and the suffering of innocent victims, the interaction of complexity and existence, consciousness thought and emotions, pleasure and pain, and polarity.

The bottom line: we don’t know the details of why Jesus had to die for our sins. The best we can do is look in retrospect, triangulate the data of scripture and life, and speculate why the atonement was necessary.

Some of the foundational axioms (assumptions) about the fundamental nature of life include:

• Human freedom is central to creating a world with significance, purpose, and meaning. Free will requires that God must remain hidden.
• Randomness and multiple layers of emergent phenomena play an important part in disguising ultimate cause.
• God knows the future, and human freedom stays intact.
• Sin separates us from God and death is its outcome.
• The mystery of existence is ultimately unknowable.

The fellowship is a small group; we encourage everyone to express their opinions, think outside the box of conventional Biblical interpretation, and maintain its letter and spirit. I believe scripture represents a logical and understandable reason underneath its claims.

A note on what is knowable based on Biblical revelation and physical observation, and what is speculation. We accept Scripture as divine revelation. To the extent that Scripture is unambiguous, we accept these revelations as authoritative and settled. To the extent that the mechanisms of these revelations are unspecified, I consider such doctrine open for speculation. Likewise, ambiguous Scripture is open to speculation.

Unambiguous doctrine includes: Christ died, rose, and He reconciles those who receive Him. Why this is true, or how it was done, is unspecified in causal/mechanistic/logical language; thus, it is open for speculation.

The speculation considered includes a cosmological hypothesis and a physical model of disorder drawn from the Conscious Point Physics (CPP) framework. These are presented as reasoned conjecture. Today’s essay is a study in hypothetical explanation for questions around the atonement. This discussion and these ideas are not 1) authoritative, 2) a replacement for scripture, or 3) divine revelation. Rather, we are engaging in informed reasoning to help give unbelievers a foothold into an abstract reality and to strengthen the faith of believers by offering a plausible explanatory metaphor to forces, structures, and rules to which reason can be applied to fill the gaps left by scripture.

II. The Application of the Atonement: Sufficiency and Reception

The discussion opened on our attempt to weigh the suffering of Christ against the accumulated evil of history. If any sin condemns a man to death, how does the death of one man compensate and counterbalance so vast a quantity of wrong committed by humanity?

The difficulty resolves when we consider the atonement is not a quantity of merit against a quantity of guilt. That is, the redemption is not a matching of sums. Rather, an entirely new paradigm must be constructed to understand how the death of the God-man, Jesus Christ, was sufficient to forgive the sins of the entire universe.

Foundational assumption: The Word/Son, as the Creator, is the essence, totality, and substance of the spirit-mind-body of the entirety of the creation.

Hypothetical method: The Son/Word declared the Conscious Points from His mind-spirit to create the “body” of creation (the physical universe), of which we are composed. We base this on John 1:3, John 1:14, Acts 17:28, among others. The important point: Christ is the entirety of the universe. The universe, the physical, psychic, soul, and spirit world of us and the creation, cannot be separated from Him. The universe is not the creation of God the Father. The Son was His creation. The universe was created by/of/from the Son. And my point of conjecture: The universe cannot be separated from the Son; the universe is an extension of the existence of the Son.

John 1:1-4 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 The same was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. 4 In him was life; and the life was the light of men.”
John 1:14 “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”
Acts 17:28 “For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.”

Jesus Christ was the creator of the entire creation. When Jesus incarnated into the creation, His spirit, as God the Son, was retained. Thus, the man Jesus Christ is intimately connected with the body of all creation, all creatures, and all men. Given that His spirit is the source of all, His incarnation is, in effect, the embodiment of every object, creature, and man. Thus, in a very literal sense, the death of His body was the death of the body (physical substance and spiritual essence) of the entire creation. The death of the source underlying all of creation is the death of the essence sustaining every man, creature, and object.

But death could not hold Him. There was no warrant against Him. The death that God demanded for sin (that is, the complete separation of Himself from the presence of the carriers of sin/darkness/disharmony)

But given that His death was unjustified within the rules according to the divine order (sin = death), His death represents an injustice that must be corrected to balance the scales. Because every sin demands a death, every death demands a sin. Thus, by the rules of justice, by the nature/essence/foundation of the God who sustains the Son, He demands justice. The balance/goodness/light of the creation/nature of God demands fairness and justice. Thus, every death must have a corresponding sin to ascribe to it. Since the body of the creation is connected to the body of Christ through His spirit (being the source of all existence of the physical world), the death of the body of Christ is in some related sense a death of the world/creation/all men. ***

Since the relation of God to Christ is one of Creator/created, and likewise, the Spirit of God is the Spirit of the Son, and in His existence/economy/nature, fairness must be executed exactly: if there was sin, death follows necessarily. This is a requirement of God’s existence/being/nature. He allows nothing dark in His spirit. He can keep the Son in His intimate presence because the Son is pure. The sin of man is hidden in the perfection of the Son. The creation is hidden in the Son. The sin of man is invisible to the judgment of God. Thus, when a man leaves the womb/the covering of the physical creation, His spirit/soul/character/deeds are exposed to the Father, and there is a separation from His spirit if there is impurity.

Thus, the death of Jesus Christ was effective as the atonement for the sins of humanity because He was (at His essence, by metaphor, and familial lineage) the body of all of humanity. As the embodied creator, His physical death was the representative of the physical death of the entirety of the creation. Thus, His death was sufficient in kind rather than exhausted by degree — a remedy whose efficacy does not diminish with use and which is therefore not consumed in application.

Thus, when Christ died, He imprinted the creation with a death. Essentially, the creation died, and the creation paid a death. The Son, the oversoul, the source of the creation, did not sin; thus, there was no sin to credit to His account. Thus the universe/the Son has an internal imbalance of credit and debit. Normally sin produces death, but death without sin is an effect missing a cause. As such, the universe is imbalanced. The cause-effect justice that God requires is not balanced.

This reframing clarifies the point that the atonement, while offered universally, is applied only upon reception. The distinction is between the sufficiency of the remedy and the necessity of its acceptance. On this reading, the work of Christ is adequate for all and effective for those who receive it; the remedy is inexhaustible, but its application is not automatic. The question is then how to access that application. The Bible declares that the atonement is applied to “those who believe.” This, of course, immediately raises the question of what constitutes belief.

As usual, the justice of hell for those who never encounter the name of Christ was an issue. The eternal condemnation of the unevangelized to loss through no fault of their own was rejected, with qualifications. Two considerations were offered. The first is scriptural: the light that “enlightens everyone” (John 1:9) is not confined to those who hear the explicit proclamation, and the moral law written on the heart (Romans 2:14–15) constitutes a genuine, if partial, access to the good.

The second is a matter of divine character: it is held to be inconsistent with the justice and mercy of God that culpability should attach to ignorance. The conclusion drawn was not a doctrine of universal automatic salvation but a refusal to close the door that scripture leaves ajar — an insistence that whatever the mechanism of reconciliation for those outside the explicit covenant, it must cohere with a God who is both righteous and merciful. The explicit pathway of the Great Commission remains essential; its necessity for those who do hear does not settle the standing of those who do not.

An alternative perspective, and the insight/vision that my ministry is based upon, is that the universe is inseparable from God, and that man was created for God’s pleasure. I believe God created us to fulfill His need for love. The Bible is a revelation of His Way of being that satisfies Him. The BIble describes the narrow gate:

• Not allowing souls into the presence of the Father without passing the gate of Christ
• He ascribes His atonement on our behalf.
• Because God does not openly inform people of His existence, we are uncertain of the consequences of living His way. Such hidden revelation allows free will. We can give unforced love (living Christ’s way) since there is truly a choice. We are not absolutely sure of His existence, rules, and consequences. We give our lives to him based on loving His Way and trusting His way is good. That is loving Him.
• Truly creating independent beings who could give love from a position of options.
• Wanting people to accept Christ to develop their character and their open-eyed love of Him.
• Allowing people in who have accepted His way in the call from their hearts.
• The deficiency is that they have not grown in character and maturity.
• What God the Father really wants is mature children to be in fellowship.
• The Father wants as many souls as possible to live through. He wants each of us to grow as a mature Son in our love of Him. He asked us to cleanse, to make Jesus Lord, and to grow in Him.
• Hebrews 5:12–14 (KJV)
  “…ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles… For every one that useth milk is unskilful in the word of righteousness… But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age…”
• 1 Corinthians 3:1–2 (KJV)
  “And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual,
  but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ. I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it…”

“Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” John 14:6 (KJV). The Son cleanses the soul of its guilt of sin before coming into the presence of the Father.

The question we are really answering is, “What serves God’s ends?” God desires that none be lost,

III. Freedom and Its Shadow

Beneath the question of application of the atonement lies a prior question about the nature of the disorder that the atonement addresses. Here the discussion turned to the origin of evil, and to a distinction between Lucifer and Satan. It appears that “Lucifer” designates a particular exalted being, the light-bearer, while “Satan” functions as a title, the accuser, applicable to any who set their own will against the will of God. The scriptural warrant/validation of this title was illustrated when Peter, resisting Christ’s path to Jerusalem, is addressed as “Satan.” This usage clearly indicates that the term “Satan” is a role of opposition rather than a proper name. “But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.” (Matthew 16:23)

In the LDS version of Satan, the adversary proposed an alternative economy of salvation — one that would secure obedience by removing the capacity to disobey. The proposal is significant because it is seductive in its efficiency. In a world in which agency is abolished, no one can fall. Such a world would also be one without love, because there would be no free will. The reasoning is that the foundational structure of reality was created so that love can be freely given. Love which cannot be withheld is not love. Coerced righteousness is a counterfeit. And it is impossible to even recognize goodness when there is no polarity to compare it with.

This yields a principle that governed much of the subsequent conversation: the same freedom that makes genuine love possible makes genuine refusal possible, and through the identical door. Sin, on this view, is not a created substance but a disharmony with God’s Way, a deviation from the order that constitutes God’s own being. God does not author evil; He permits the condition of freedom because no other condition allows the expression of real reciprocity of love. The adversary’s alternative, whatever its promise of safety, would have destroyed the very thing creation exists to make possible.

IV. The Wrath of God and the Nature of Hell

If sin is the use of freedom to choose darkness in its varying forms, what is the divine response to it? The Biblical language, “wrath of God,” may be reframed without diminishing it. In the common picture, wrath is imagined as active hostility — a God who strikes at the sinner in anger. The proposed alternative construes wrath instead as withdrawal: the removal of the divine presence and love from those who have set themselves against it. Because human beings are constituted for relationship with the Father, the withdrawal of that relationship is not a mild consequence but a crisis at the root of the self. Wrath, so understood, is not the opposite of love but one of its expressions — the honoring of a creature’s refusal, and the permitting of the consequences that refusal entails.

The analogy is parental: the parent who releases an addicted adult child to the consequences of his choices does not thereby cease to love him, but recognizes that love cannot underwrite self-destruction. The withdrawal is itself an act of love, in that it refuses to sustain the illusion that the choice is without cost. This reframing carries a pastoral benefit noted in the discussion. It replaces the picture of an angry and unappeasable deity, whom one must perpetually placate, with the picture of a God whose “wrath” is the felt absence of love. The love of God never stops, but He cannot by His nature allow unrepentant sin in His presence.

The nature of hell was treated as continuous with this account. Three descriptions were placed side by side. The LDS description construes hell as damnation in the etymological sense of arrest — to be “dammed” is to be stopped, halted in one’s progression toward the divine, cut off from association with God by one’s own turning away. On this view, eternal damnation need not mean unending punishment; “eternal” functions as a name of God, so that “eternal damnation” is God’s damnation, a condition from which, in the vast economy of an eternal existence, one might yet be recovered. A Catholic described a movement away from the image of a subterranean place of fire toward the recognition that one carries heaven or hell within, wherever one is — while retaining belief in heaven as a genuine destination. A third description, a Protestant standpoint, located hell in the absence of God’s love: not primarily a place but a condition, and a company — those who are together in their separation from the source of love, in a state that the observable miseries of this world only faintly anticipate.

These accounts differ; in each, hell is understood as the natural terminus of a refusal to submit to the Lordship/Way of Christ, rather than an arbitrary sentence externally imposed. It is self-borne — the retained condition of one who has declined the only order that sustains life and love.

V. The Veil: Why God Remains Hidden

A philosophically central thread concerns the hiddenness of God. Why, if the divine reality is as glorious as the tradition maintains, is it not simply shown? Why must faith operate across a veil of unknowing? Three answers were advanced

1. The first is that the veil is necessary for the development of faith, which is important because God desires that we have faith in Him. “But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” (Hebrews 11:6). The question is then, why does God desire us to have faith? Why does this please Him? The answer may be that He wants us to trust His character. Trust is an aspect of love. Faith is aspirational. Faith exists only over a distance. Relationship can only occur across a separation. Faith has an element of mystery, the unknown, and desire. All of these add attraction and polarity, which draw us closer. Separation is required in a universe where there is only One, and all relationship with and “other” is an illusion. Thus, while separation is an illusion, it is central to the experience of love. Faith, hope, and love are the three that are fundamental to establishing relationship.
2. The second answer is that the veil is the condition of freedom. Deductive proof would compel like gravity — and compulsion abolishes the freedom that love requires. Consider a person acting under the threat of a leveled weapon: such a person is nominally free to move, but the situation has rendered that freedom meaningless. If the perfection of God’s way and the futility of every alternative were rendered obvious beyond the possibility of doubt, there would be no genuine choice but to love God, and therefore no genuine love. The opacity of the world is not a defect in its design but a feature of it: the very fact that things are not self-evidently “peachy” is what makes a free response possible; deductive proof would remove any need for faith.
3. The third answer is that the veil is a form of protection. If the gravest sin is the deliberate rejection of goodness in full knowledge of what one rejects. The sin that scripture names blasphemy against the Holy Spirit and declares unforgivable is held behind a veil. By withholding full knowledge, man has been spared the possibility of committing that ultimate refusal. “Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.” (Matthew 12:31) On this reading, no creature now living possesses the unveiled vision that would make such a sin possible; even the most monstrous historical actors retained some measure of the protecting ignorance. The unforgivable sin is unforgivable not because God is unwilling to forgive but because it is the rejection of goodness at its foundation, leaving no place from which repentance might begin. The veil, then, is mercy: it prevents the creature from arriving at the one condition from which there is no return.

VI. A Speculative Cosmogony of Light and Dark

The essay now enters expressly speculative territory, and the reader is asked to hold what follows as conjecture. The framework’s author is emphatic that this cosmological hypothesis is not offered as the teaching of scripture, but intends the speculation to be within the bounds of that which is consistent with/non-contradictory of scripture and hence plausibly reflecting reality.

The primary deficiency we face in our understanding of reality is that the conceptual passage from nothing to something is indefensible. We have no idea how existence arose from nothing (or alternatively, how existence is eternal/had no beginning). It is my contention that there was a beginning, but again, we have no concept of how such a transformation could occur.

I say this as a preface to our examination of the plausibility of atonement, because we need a radically different model of the universe to justify a universe where the death of the creator of this universe, who incarnated, can be logically ascribed to be a logical necessity or efficacious act to restore his relationship to God. Therefore, the question we face is how we can economically and logically explain the creation in such a way that the atonement followed naturally from the structure of the creation. That is, the atonement and the other Scriptural declarations, requirements, and declarations produce a logical necessity.

The hypothesis offered to thread the gauntlet of scriptural requirements and observed physical reality, and logical causality is as follows: God always existed, but He arose from nothing to His maturity by gradations. (Note this statement silently disguises the fact that we have no idea how God began His existence.) The scripture describes doctrine being built “line upon line” rather than by abrupt leaps from nothing to perfection. “For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line;
here a little, and there a little:” (Isaiah 28:10)

In the same way, I postulate that God arose/manifested from nothing in stages. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” (Genesis 1:1–2). Clearly this is symbolic language. The question is perhaps He manifested conscious points to create a primal polarity against which to establish a standard by which He defined Himself as light, faith, hope, and love.

His establishment of the primal worlds may have been in the same way the Son manifested the universe and spiritual worlds. Thus, God may have generated a background of light and dark, awake and asleep, attraction and repulsion,  as the first polarity. From that nothingness may have been an undifferentiated space, a mixture in which light and dark, the polarities of awareness and inertness, wakefulness and sleep. It is from this mixture that I postulate the being we recognize and name God arose. God is the One who is wholly allied with the light. He is the one who refuses all commerce with the dark. He is concentrated into pure and ordered consciousness, “in whom is no darkness at all,” in whom there is no shadow of turning. The separation of light from dark, a scriptural image, is here read as the self-organization of the divine by the total rejection of the inert.

From this initial assumption, the remainder of the hypothesis follows with comparative ease. The fact that a unified theory of body, soul, and spirit, creation, God, free will, sin, accidents, and the purpose of life is explained is what gives this theory a sense that it is true. Because the divine nature is love, and love requires an other capable of free response, God wills a genuine other. But a being who is to be capable of choosing the light must also be capable of choosing the dark. The Father, by His very constitution and nature, is committed to reject the dark and those who choose it.

To allow man to be in the same space as God, the Father created the Son, identical to Himself, committed to Godliness/light/Truth, beauty, justice… The difference between the Father and Son is that the Son can look at evil without separating the evil from His creation. Thus, the Son created the Conscious Points, from which he could create a physical universe and living beings clothed in bodies of matter. Each person has a spirit, which is the light of man, and is from Christ. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” (John 1:4) The soul of the man arises from the configuration of the Conscious Points composing the body. The spirit of man is like the Son, eternal, created in the image of God. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” (Genesis 1:27).

Life as soul-formation, refinement, and maturation:

• “Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience.
  But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.” (James 1:3–4)
• “I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried.” (Zechariah 13:9)
• “Though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.” (2 Corinthians 4:16)
• “Tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope.” (Romans 5:3–4)
• “For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth… Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous… but afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness.” (Hebrews 12:6, 11)
• “We all… are changed into the same image from glory to glory.” (2 Corinthians 3:18)
• The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree… Those that be planted in the house of the LORD shall flourish… They shall still bring forth fruit in old age.” (Psalm 92:12–14)
• “The trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth… might be found unto praise and honour and glory.” (1 Peter 1:7)

Thus, it appears that the spirit is immature when it comes into a body. The spirit watches, and the soul learns. There is a distinction between body, soul, and spirit:

• 1. The clearest verse: spirit, soul, and body distinguished:
  “And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Thessalonians 5:23) Paul lists three distinct components of human nature.
• 2. The Word of God divides soul and spirit: “For the word of God is quick, and powerful… piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow…” (Hebrews 4:12) This verse teaches that soul and spirit are not identical — they can be “divided.”
• 3. Body vs. spirit: “The body without the spirit is dead.” (James 2:26) The spirit is what gives life to the body.
• 4. Spirit returns to God: “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.” (Ecclesiastes 12:7) Body → earth Spirit → God
• 5. Soul as the seat of life and personhood: “The soul that sinneth, it shall die.” (Ezekiel 18:4) The soul is treated as the moral, personal self.
• 6. Jesus distinguishes soul and body: “Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul…” (Matthew 10:28) Body ≠ soul.
• 7. Spirit vs. flesh (body): “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Matthew 26:41 (KJV) Spirit = inner will, Flesh = physical weakness

Summary of biblical anthropology

• Body: Physical form “Dust of the ground”, can be killed by men
• Soul: Personal identity, seat of emotion, desire, moral agency, can be saved or lost, distinct from the body
• Spirit: God‑given life principle, Returns to God, Distinct from the soul, and can be “divided” from the soul (Heb 4:12)

The story: the Spirit is given by God but placed in a fog of forgetfulness. (The spirit was either aware before life, or was created newly and then grew with the soul.) Thus, man either does not know or does not remember that this is a challenge to mature his soul. Man, incarnated, blind to the spirit world, can look upon both light and dark and freely choose either one. The way of the flesh is more attractive in the short run, and the way of the spirit is more attractive in the long run.

This hypothesis incorporates and gives explanatory weight to two mysterious declarations of Scripture

• 1) The Son, and not the Father, is the creator of the physical universe and the Heavens, John 1:3
• 2) The Son was born a man, lived a sinless life, claimed to be God and the Son of God, did miracles, taught the way to God, prophesied His own death, was crucified, was dead for 3 days, and the Father raised Him to life.
• The Son entered His creation as a man, experienced the temptations of men, and yet did not sin. He lived in the exact resonance of man, and yet His spirit was the spirit of the Son of God. He was condemned and executed unjustly, and separated from God.
• Death could not hold Him because He had violated no law.
• The laws that are in effect in the physical universe are the laws of God, and the Son shields the sin of the physical universe from the Father;
• He was the Son of God; He was perfect; He shielded the creation and its evil from God; when man emerged from His body into the presence of God, the Son had the right to pay the debt of the sinner. The right due for sin is death. The isolation/the banishment from the kingdom of light and life is the requirement of a Holy God, which is what The Son lives inside of. The universe has evil in it, but the Son is the gatekeeper, and He insures justice is perfect within His unverse, and thus complies with the overall requirement of the Father’s being. It is for this reason that the Son had to create a universe that paid for the sin overall, and thus allowed fungibility, the exchange of one debt for the payment of another. Thus, the system is one of balanced score overall, which allows sinful man to leave the universe (upon his death) with His debt paid and enter into God’s realm of purity, having had his debt paid, and having committed his heart to living the way of God – aligned with the light that is the only allowable state in the presence of the Father.

The possibility of freely given love and the possibility of consciously chosen evil enter the world together. The mediation of the Son is what allows a holy God to remain in relation with a world in which evil is possible.

VII. The Cancellation of Disorder: Physical and Relational Accounts

The question is then, how the atonement accomplishes what it accomplishes. Two accounts are offered. They are not rivals but descriptions of a single event at two levels: the one causal and structural, the other relational and juridical.

The first account draws on the CPP framework and is, again, speculative. It construes moral disorder as conservative in terms of acts and consequences: every act of goodness or sin imprints the substrate of reality with a disturbance that propagates outward through the substance of creation, the Dipole Sea. Given the time-bound relation between acts and effects in the physical world, the imprint of evil cannot be undone by a subsequent ripple of good deeds. The ripple of evil travels at the speed of light through the DP Sea, and a good deed done later would not erase that original etheric imprint. It may offset a human’s debt to another, but it does not affect the imprint on the creation. The wrong, once committed, has already “left the shore.” The proposed remedy that Christ offers with the atonement is not compensation but cancellation. Cancellation can be understood by analogy. Consider a wave tank with a paddle (a 2×4 floating on the water, pushed up and down) that makes long waves that travel down the tank from one end. On the other end of the tank, a similar block is driven up and down, creating waves that travel the opposite direction, driven in exact anti-phase, generating a wave that meets the first and, by superposition, returns the surface to rest. Using this concept of opposite-phase superposition, Christ in His death imprints the substrate with the full weight of death, and in His resurrection imprints it with life; and because He is master of the created order, the wave of life He has generated may be applied, upon command and request, to any disturbance of death, neutralizing it. The result is not concealment of sin but its abolition — the disorder is not hidden but gone, and the creature is thereby rendered “presentable” before the unveiled purity of God.

The alternative account reframes the atonement not as a quantitative transaction of multiplied punishments but as a drama of persons, consequences, and repair within nested realities. Sin is understood through its propagating effects: a single wrong act enters the web of personal relationships and sends ripples outward. Each person touched by it transmits the damage onward, often unconsciously, so that the full cost of even one sin is ultimately incalculable across the community of persons.

Into this wounded economy Christ enters. He does not absorb an accumulated quantity of penalties scaled to every sinner. Instead, He undergoes the punishment in kind—the complete withdrawal of the Father’s love and presence that any single soul’s sin would merit. Because He is without sin, physical death cannot retain Him. The injustice of His death therefore stands as an open credit in a conservative moral universe: an unmerited separation that must be answered by restoration or by transfer.

The universe the Son created exists inside the Father’s larger reality. Within the Son’s created order, sin is shielded during earthly life by the protective structure of embodiment and the Son’s sustaining presence. When a person dies and sheds the body, that protection ends. The sin, previously hidden, is exposed to the Father’s direct judgment. The individual stands unclean and faces the separation—the “outer darkness” and self-torment—that sin inherently produces.

As Creator of that inner universe, the Son bears a real liability for what occurs within it. From the Father’s perspective, the impurity generated inside the Son’s world is, in a derivative sense, the Son’s responsibility. At the cross this liability is actualized. The veil is torn; the Father beholds the sin the Son has taken upon Himself. The sentence of separation that rightly belongs to the sinner passes to Christ. Yet because Christ remains personally sinless, the sentence has no destructive power over Him, and He was resurrected to life by the Father because death could not hold him.

Death and separation are neutralized in His case. He survives the wrath He has shouldered. Two paths are thereby opened for the sinner. Either the Son is banished from the Father’s presence on account of the impurity He has carried (an unjust outcome, since He Himself is pure), or the Son remains in the Father’s presence and, upon the sinner’s emergence from earthly protection at death, receives the judgment in the sinner’s stead.

The second path is realized at the cross. The Son, having already undergone the required separation as a man, now stands as the gatekeeper. When a person who has trusted in Christ dies, the Son applies the credit of His own unjust death to that individual’s account. The record of sin in the DP Sea is blotted out. The person is cleansed. His noble/worthy/good character, the treasure he has laid up in Heaven, is saved, and the worthless character, the part that catered to the flesh, is erased, salted with fire and burned.

Removing the accumulated debt and the enslaving tendency to sin leaves a renewed person fit for the Father’s presence. This account yields a doctrine of repair that extends beyond the individual’s cleansing. The reconciled person does not cease to be an author of ripples. Past sins have already sent consequences into the world, and new choices continue to do so.

Reconciliation therefore carries a commission: the restored individual is yoked to Christ in the ongoing work of reversing disorder. The only instrument of repair available in the framework of the physical world is the drawing of other persons into the same reconciliation. Each soul brought to Christ becomes, in turn, an agent who can interrupt the propagation of damage and initiate healing in others. The result is a snowball dynamic. As more persons enter reconciliation, the sphere of active disorder contracts. Opportunities for new damage diminish.

In this light, the Great Commission is not primarily a program of recruitment but the practical mechanism by which a wounded world is progressively restored. One participant in the discussion extends this logic to a hope of universal reconciliation, holding that Scripture ultimately points toward the salvation of all. That conviction is offered here as a live tension with conventional interpretation of Scripture, but sufficient references to the salvation of all are present in Scripture that it must be included as one of the poles of a paradox that begs for a larger explanation.

The convergence of the two accounts is the essay’s central claim. The physical model describes the cleansing required to stand in the presence of a wholly pure God; the relational model describes the restoration of the world of persons and consequences. They are the same reconciliation told from different frames, and each is impoverished without the other. Neither, it should be added, could be accomplished by a God who did not become incarnate: only a real death, unjustly borne in a genuine body, could generate the wave of life that overcomes it, and only an embodied life could furnish the authority by which that life is dispensed.

VIII. The Question of Purpose and the Posture of the Child

Having gotten some insights into how the process of atonement may have been implemented, the next question to address is the purpose of creation, which corresponds to many of the “Why” questions: Why death and resurrection? Why the obligation to obey? Why this life? Why the labor of teaching others? And why the suffering of the innocent?

The issue of the suffering of the innocents gives the why questions teeth. We see the injustice of suffering, that lack of conservative cause-and-effect in the cycle/orbit/domain of any individual person’s life. For many, there is an obvious injustice in the lack of causal connection between a life profoundly and undeservedly afflicted. We heard this vividly illustrated by the story of the sudden health loss for a young woman with a great capacity for joy. A second story of a young survivor of grievous childhood abuse who transformed her suffering into a vocation of care for others.

The theological register of these accounts is the pattern of John 9, in which the man born blind is neither his own fault nor his parents’ but an occasion for the works of God to be displayed. This falls under the aphorism that one’s joy is one’s sorrow unmasked, and that the depth carved into a person by suffering becomes the measure of what that person can afterward contain and give. The essay records these instances with sobriety and without resolution, as the discussion did, refusing the false comfort of an explanation that would make the suffering acceptable in advance.

To the question of ultimate purpose, no single answer was imposed. What emerged instead was a proposal about the posture proper to creatures who do not possess the answer. Perhaps, in the face of such suffering, we must become as a little child to enter the kingdom. The child does not stand outside each moment appraising it, comparing its yield of satisfaction against alternatives not chosen, anxiously projecting how long it will last. That recursive self-regard — the endless calculation about experience rather than the having of it is itself a species of hell. The child simply receives what is given. Perhaps this receptivity is a foretaste of what heaven is: not a reward earned and then evaluated, but presence fully occupied by what is present. We note that the Latin pax is the derivation for both peace and a pact. The peace is the result of the settled accord. Heaven, on this reading, is the condition of those who have entered into accord with God and now simply dwell within His order, as within a world that is good.

This posture does not dissolve the “why,” and it was not offered as a substitute for the inquiry the question demands. It offers, rather, the disposition in which the inquiry can be borne without despair — the recognition that finite creatures, working at an immense subject with partial knowledge, may proceed in trust rather than in the paralysis of demanded certainty. The parallel to the essay’s account of the veil is exact: as faith is the medium proper to a veiled knowledge of God, so childlike presence is the medium proper to a veiled knowledge of purpose.

On Why:

Having noted that we do not know why, we nevertheless long to know, and we speculate.

• Why the death and resurrection of Christ?
  • His death and resurrection were simply methods of creating a doorway through which we can escape from the physical world and be in relationship with a perfect God. Without the womb of the physical universe shielding our sin from His perfection, we would not have been able to grow to be mature, develop our own character, and be individuals with free will.
• Why the obligation to obey?
  • Obedience is a requirement to live in God’s universe. If we are not perfect, we cannot survive in God’s body-mind.
• Why this life?
  • Life was created to satisfy God’s desire for companionship in the fullest way possible. To satisfy God’s heart, life must be real. Life truly is as unknown inside His perspective as it seems to be from ours. Our perspective truly is His perspective from our viewpoint. He desires to fully experience relationship, and it is as hard for Him to be satisfied by it as it is for us.
• Why the labor of teaching others.
  • This is the process of teaching others to enjoy living inside of life, and doing it from God’s perspective. It is the lighting a candle from another candle, and lighting another; the light spreads. This is all for expanding His joy. If we do not have joy, neither does He. We are teaching faith, hope, and love in the midst of the confusion.
• Why the suffering of the innocent?
  • If there were no possible consequence of disorder, then there would be no joy in the order. The sorrow of the innocent victim is incomprehensible in the frame of the individual. It is sorrow/pain/loss… in the heart of God. God desires to maximize His joy/love/peace, and if everyone takes their lot in the best way possible, we have served God by appreciating the experience of being in this world. Pushing against difficulty and doing it well is of more benefit than living a life of ease and simply enjoying the goodness of life. There is a reward in following His way, developing character, and trials provide more opportunity to develop character.

IX. Conclusion

The discussion this week was in the form of a single argument. Its claim is that the atonement is the act that allows the reuniting of man with God the Father in relationship. Without the atonement, man is held in the cocoon of the physical universe, sustained by Christ, insulating sinful man from the perfection of the Father. In this state, it is impossible to leave that protective environment to be in direct fellowship with the Father. But because of the atonement, man has the possibility of escaping the confines of the physical universe and being in that open, unveiled relationship with Him.

God is love according to scripture, and from common sense we derive that He is inherently alone if he is the source of all. Love by its nature requires the experience of an “other”. He created creatures capable of free will, which means beings capable of refusing to love Him and choosing to follow the way of the flesh over the Way of Christ.

There must be a separation between God and man in a meaningful way for God and man to have a relationship. And while we probably don’t understand and have not described/concepturalized exactly how He produced a split from One into many, the illusion of separation is significant enough that a statement of “I am me, and God is someone else,” seems absurdly obvious.

If God’s nature is pure harmonic order as a synonym or metaphor for His state of love, light, truth, beauty, justice, life… and there is no shadow of their counterpart in His world, then He cannot allow sinful humanity to enter that space. So the ability to generate genuine love is dependent upon the creation of separation that allows us to exist in the space of His existence.

Creating a world of order and goodness is the creation that a perfectly good God can create. A holy God cannot allow the disorder in His presence that man, with true free will, generates. The Son, creating a creation that man could live in and be free, allows God to be separated from the sin that man must use as his other lover against which God competes for man’s affection. In ordinary life, it is our way of being, the holiness and goodness of one’s life that brings honor and commendation to the Father and Son as the pattern of the life of God.

The atonement is purely a reparative strategy to allow man to emerge from the womb of the physical universe, within the shield of the Son’s purity before the Father, and to exist. The death of Christ was necessary as a fulfillment of prophecy, and prophecy was necessary as a symbolic pointer giving plausible proof of revelation to those with eyes to see.

The atonement was the death of the physical death of the incarnation of the creator of our universe. If death unveils the soul to judgment, and there is impurity/sin/unGodliness associated with that soul, then the Father will cast Him out. He did not. He raised the Son/Jesus Christ to life. The death that the Son experienced in His incarnation was unjust, and as such, in God’s environment of perfect justice, is a credit looking for a debit. As such, Christ can supply that debit to the account of anyone who enters the plane of the Kingdom of God.

Thus there may be multiple layers upon which the atonement is acting. Ultimately, we live in a command-based universe. The Conscious Points operate, perceive, compute, and move according to rules. The ultimate cost and consequence of enforcing all of the rules (in this paradigm) is the postulate of a God who is committed to focusing on light/life/awakeness, and allowing any darkness into His consideration/dwelling/meditation would be contrary to His being; in fact, He would not be who He is if He allowed darkness in His being. His very being is at stake. He is focused/aware/alive because He is committed to those. He is who He is because He has rejected all other aspects of Himself/the primal grey/mixture of light and dark, and embraced only light. “This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” (1 John 1:5)***

Perhaps the As purely the disorder must not be overlooked but canceled; and because the cancellation must be accomplished within the created order by one who is both innocent and master of that order, it is accomplished by the incarnate Son, whose death and resurrection generate the remedy that reconciliation applies. The wrath that this order requires is best understood as the honoring of refusal by withdrawal, and the hell that terminates unremedied refusal as a self-borne condition rather than an imposed sentence. The veil across which all of this is transacted is at once the condition of faith, the guarantor of freedom, and a protection against the one refusal from which there is no recovery.

The framework’s speculative elements — the cosmogony of light and dark, the wave model of moral disorder — are offered as reasoned conjecture. We do not know the mechanism by which God maintains the universe or why He could not have created the universe directly, and not through the Son. We do not know the actual mechanism by which Christ pays the debt, or what rule required Him to die to pay for our sins and restore our relationship to Him.

The only thing we know is that the Bible says we are reconciled with God by the blood of Christ and by making Him Lord of our lives. If the model of creation proposed here is helpful in rationalizing why Jesus’ sacrifice is effective and reasonable, then use it; otherwise, just remember, belive, and act on the Biblical promises:

• Romans 5:10 (KJV) 
  “For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.”
• Colossians 1:20–22 (KJV)
  “And, having made peace through the blood of his cross…
  you… hath he reconciled in the body of his flesh through death…”
• Romans 10:9 (KJV)
  “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus,
  and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”
• Luke 6:46 (KJV)
  “And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?”
• Colossians 2:6 (KJV)
  “As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him.”
• Ephesians 1:7 (KJV)
  “In whom we have redemption through his blood, the  forgiveness of sins…”
• Philippians 2:11 (KJV)
  “…that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King. 1 Chronicles 12:38

260712 – Meeting – Surrender of the Will – Key to Lordship

by Thomas Abshier | Jul 13, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Surrender of the Will

What “I Accept Jesus as Lord” Actually Means

Christos Fellowship Essay | 12 July 2026

This week’s reference essay: Why Did Jesus Have to Die for My Sins

Occasion. For three weeks now the fellowship has been circling one question, the same one that drove me out of the faith as a young man and sent me searching through the religions of the world for a decade: What are the rules of a world where a death two thousand years ago affects my relationship with God? I said the sinner’s prayer as a boy and was told I would go to heaven; and then at sixteen or seventeen I put on “enlightened shoelaces” and asked how in the world that world actually worked. How the act of confessing Jesus as Lord, accepting His death as effective in paying the debt for my sin, was causally connected to restoring my relationship with God. I think my introspection and last week’s essay answered that question definitively. We are still struggling with the actual mechanism as to whether the mechanism of the healing of that relationship is legal (God declaring a set of rule and then saying you have to meet this bar), or physical-spiritual (how does the nature of spiritual substance and its interaction with life/action/choice respond to sin and how can the death of a substitute have an atoning/healing/repairing effect on the spirtual-physical substance), or judicial-physical (there is a spiritual substance and it responds this way to sin, and if you do this repairative action then the sin is resolved, and the Biblical injunction of accepting the sacrifice, and following the law from then on is merely a legally-framed declaration of the cause effect relationship in the spiritual-physical realm). The bottom line is that there must be a change in the human heart. Michael opened the discussion with a paradox about our ability to determine absolute truth. Charlie asked for a practical application of that consideration. Susan shared a testimony and a vision. Let me set it down.

I. The paradox, and the bridge between nothing and something

Michael came in laughing at himself. Weeks ago I had asked him whether he thought there could be such a thing as absolute truth, and he had said yes, it may be possible; and only afterward did it strike him that if he had said no — there is no absolute truth – he would have been asserting an absolute truth, and so contradicting himself in the saying. There is only one direction that question can be answered without the answer eating itself.

I take that seriously, and I also want to name what it is and is not. It is a real feature of the world that our language can tie itself in knots — the omnipotent God and the immovable rock are the same species of knot, two concepts fitted together in a way that cannot be resolved. What Michael had done was to shift frames mid-thought: to deny the absolute, he had to step outside himself and take up the very absolute standpoint he was denying, judging absolute truth from a seat that only an absolute could occupy. That the denial refutes itself does not, by itself, prove the absolute; it shows that we cannot get behind the absolute to pass sentence on it from some neutral ground, because there is no neutral ground. So I hold the existence of an absolute as a postulate — an axiom I cannot prove from a relative frame, because to prove it from a relative frame would already be to stand where I claim I cannot stand. All the evidence points there. In the end, it comes down to empirics, triangulation on a single point based on evidence, and then living according to the practicality of a statistic that is 100% as far as the empirical experience of reality. That is what is necessary to do with all inductive reasoning, which is virtually the only tool we have for navigating the physical-spiritual world we live in.

And then the conversation walked, as our conversations do, straight to the edge of the world. Everything we can name traces back — the keyboard to atoms, the atoms to the Big Bang, the Big Bang to a single point, to the question of where that point came from. Every chain of “where did that come from” runs back to the same wall. The question is always, “what came before the point?” This is always the wall. The human mind is built on befores producing nows, and when we reach the first now we cannot help but ask for its before — and there is no before. We are always confronted with “something came from nothing/.” The problem is that we have no precedent of mechanism for describing the process by which something arises from nothing. Every alternative we offer only illustrates the same problem: a rebounding universe still had to start; a multiverse still had to come from something; and saying it started from God begs the question, “where did God come from?” We cannot even say God simply always was, because that relocates the question to where that “forever” came from. Michael then resorted to naming “nothing” as the empty set, which is the null element that logic allows us to hold within a larger set. But this only gives us a name for the nothing, and it is not a territory. The null set is a fine symbol; it is a token in our map for a state; it does not illuminate the thing itself, and it cannot be causally connected to the ordered world we stand in. And Michael then renamed the empty set as the bridge between nothing and something. That, I told him, is exactly the topic.

This is not a detour from the atonement but its foundation. There is one link in the whole chain of being that will never yield to us: the step from nothing to the most primitive manifestation of God. Every concept we own already stands within being/existence/somethingness and assumes God’s existence and the manipulation of the substance He created; we cannot think the far side of that line because there is no substance with which to think and no substance to think about. That is, if there is no substrate to hold the mind, it cannot manipulate the possibilities of future organization of the substrate  – both the thinker and the thought are missing in the world where only the nothing exists. We must have a thinking apparatus, and data to think about/manipulate for consciousness to be useful. The declaration of the Bible by God, about Himself, I AM THAT I AM, is not an answer to how nothing became God; it declares the fact that God is existent. It does not tell us how that existence came into being.

II. Charlie’s question about the need for the atonement

Then Charlie said, For most of his life he had held the atonement to be flatly necessary — a kind of divine human sacrifice that had to be paid before our sins could be forgiven. And lately, for the first time, he had begun to wonder: as a parent, I would never demand payment from my child. He does wrong, he says sorry, I forgive him and forget it, no atonement required. So why would God require one?

This question illuminates an important principle: in that very picture lies the answer. Imagine the child is going through the house with a hammer, breaking things. If you come out and say, “Sweet Junior, I forgive you” — and you leave —and he keeps swinging the hammer. Your commitment to forgiveness would be overridden by the rebellion. Forgiveness is not appropriate because the child’s will, his commitment to respectful behavior, has not changed. The parent forgives because the child’s will has changed, and you can restart the relationship in a moment with complete love and openness toward the child. Thus, forgiveness rests on a change — spoken or unspoken: I will not swing the hammer anymore when I am angry, or just want to.

That is the same bottom line I had derived from my writing and conversation with Isak. This is the criterion upon which this whole business of “Jesus died for our sins, and you must accept Jesus” rests: at bottom, we give Him our will — we let Him be Lord, and His way of being becomes the way we submit ourselves to. Why would Christ grant a man reconciliation with the Father at the judgment seat, or on earth, while he still intends to continue following his animal instincts and passions? Forgiveness, atonement, canceling of debts is totally inappropriate when there is no change of heart and no surrender of will. Jesus Christ would not apply His power of atonement to our sins and allow us into Heaven if we had no intent of submitting our will to His Way. Forgiveness is only appropriate in a life that has said, “I give my will to doing Your will.” That is what “I accept Jesus as Lord” is. “Jesus is Lord” is shorthand for I accept His way of living.

Michael noted that forgiveness and atonement are two different things, and he is right. Forgiveness is what the wronged one does after the child has submitted his will to right behaviors. After that transformation, you do not hate the child the rest of your life; you let it go. That is the easy part. Atonement is paying the debt, the child fixing the piano, which means working off the debt for its repair. The making-right and the changed will are two halves of the process. The letting go of resentment is real. That is what heals the relationship. Atonement is what heals the house.

With these practical examples, we can see what the sacrificial system and the cross were moving toward. There is damage that is done to God’s world on a spiritual level when we sin. When we commit to change, we are forgiven, and relationship is reestablished. But atonement is the repair of the damage we have done to the physical and spiritual worlds. God can cleanse the spiritual debt, and that is the atonement that His death did at the cross. That atonement is applied on the spiritual level when we have surrendered our will and rejected the rebellious spirit. The other half of the atonement is our work to repair the damage we have caused to the world. This balances all the accounts.

Isak asked if the atonement was baked into the foundation of the universe. Was the atonement one of the world’s rules from the beginning?

I believe there was an intent to pay for the sins of man from the foundation of the world, but the funding/the credit for that payment had not yet been deposited/transacted in the physical world through the death of Christ. I think the Father and Son knew the rules and restrictions the universe required. As a result, they made a plan to atone for the damage done by man, doing so through the unjust death of Christ. Knowing the structure of creation, they deemed this an effective way to pay the debt for the damage sin has done to men in the spirit realm. After the crucifixion, the account was funded and could be drawn upon. I think the funding/credit/reservoir metaphor we are using is, in some way, valid and can help us understand how the crucifixion was effective. The three ways that I can see this how the death of Christ may have been implemented were as follows: 1) a reservoir of credit in an accounting system where Christ deposited credit to pay a debt that we owed, or 2) as the canceling of a harmonic disturbance created by sin, or 3) as an accumulated energetic debt that was stored like charge on a capacitor, which was discharged to grounding, and Christ was capable of doing that because He grounded. These are plausible metaphors and methods of cause and effect.

Charlie asked, does one need to understand the atonement in order to benefit from it?

I do not think one needs to understand the atonement to receive its benefit. We don’t really know the spiritual universe or its rules. To the extent that we do know the mechanism of the atonement, we only hold this knowledge as a plausible model. We are making and presenting plausible metaphors based upon the restrictions and allowances of the Biblical revelation, and all this so that the modern man can have his sense of mechanistic explanation satisfied. But all that actually matters is that a soul gave its will to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. The sentiment/will expressed in the sinner’s prayer is our conscious/willful assent to His Lordship and states that I am now willing to accept You as Lord; I am committed to living Your way. That is the outcome the explanatory apparatus exists to produce. Modern man requires scientific explanations for everything to be deeply believed.

The purpose of the explanation of the atonement is to answer the question, “How does it work?” to provide the explanation that satisfies the inquisitive, reductionist modern man who requires mechanical causal chains to believe it is real. By having this question answered, he can say, “Yes, I am willing to be submissive, to give my will to you.” The “why it works?” question is orthogonal to “does it work?” The only thing that matters is submitting one’s will to guidance and obedience to the way of Christ. If one needs to know how it works to submit, that is what this explanation is for. If you don’t need to know why or how it works, and you simply know, intuitively, that it is good to submit to the will of Jesus Christ, and the leading of the Holy Spirit, whose Way was revealed in the Holy Bible, then that is all that is necessary. The explanation is for the doubting Thomases among us.

III. Who walked in the garden, and the Father shielded from evil

Isak asked, the Father brings forth the Son, and the Son makes everything else — so who walked in the garden with Adam?

The answer the church reached long ago, and the answer this framework requires, is the Son. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… all things were made by him (John 1:1-3). If nothing that was made was made without Him, then when God appears within His own creation — in the garden, in the bush, in the wrestling — it is the Son who appears, never the Father in His unmediated nature. The Son appears in His own play.

And this bears on next week’s essay; before the Son there is the Father, God prior to the manifestation. I have long visualized the first division of Father to Son as a point looking back at itself, each regarding the other, each saying I AM THAT I AM, two that came from the one, and they are one from the perspective of the whole. The next differentiation is the Son imaging within Himself all the Conscious Points that will fill a universe. Having placed them all at the center of the Grid Point Lattice, He says, let there be light. They repel and move outward, interact, form galaxies, stars, supernovae, recongeal, and form planets, where He can shape the dust into creatures who feel the war between the animal and the moral, living in an imperfect world. But the Father is a perfect being who will not hold imperfection within Himself. So, the Son makes a universe that contains unconsciousness, violation of love and harmony, and death. He hides the imperfection, the darkness, within Himself from the Father, as a kind of cocoon, a shielded domain in which evil, disorder, and disharmony could exist in creation without being subjected to the Father’s purifying wrath that separates the dark from the light. The physical world is that veil, and its author is the veil. And when the veil of physicality falls away at death, we stand at last where the covering is gone, and must be presented to the Father. The Son judges each man, burns the impurities of his character, and presents us as cleansed and able to stand pure before the Father.

IV. The pygmies, and the will as the thing that saves

Which inevitably brought us to the question: what about the ones who never heard? Isak framed as the ninety-nine percent of humanity, across all of history, outside the small region and the small window where the gospel was preached; the man wrestling reindeer in the Arctic, the Amazon tribesman, the pygmy in the rainforest. Is the “passcode” really the saying of a particular name — or is it something more like a way of life, an inclination to hear God even without knowing which God it is? For there is plainly a natural sense of good and evil in every culture, the same as the carnal nature is everywhere.

Here, the question of “will” serves us in resolving this problem. Salvation is not first the saying of a syllable; it is the surrender of the will to the way of Christ — and a soul can be surrendering to that way without yet knowing its name. Personify the way: here is a Person with a certain character, certain commitments, a certain manner of being, and to follow that manner, to be submitted to living as He lives, is to submit the will to Christ, whether or not the lips have learned to call Him Christ. So the man who has never heard, but who feels the urge to give rather than hoard, to feed the stranger rather than himself, and who yields his will to that — he is, in the only sense that finally matters, surrendering to the way of the One who is that way. This is not my invention; it is Paul’s: those who never had the law, doing by nature the things of the law, are a law unto themselves (Romans 2:14); and the invisible things of God are clearly seen in the things He has made, so that they are without excuse (Romans 1:20). No one is without some light — for that was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world (John 1:9).

But I must hold two things together and not let either go, because Scripture holds both and they look like a contradiction. There are verses that say plainly no one comes to the Father but by the Son, that a man must confess Him. And there are verses that say every knee shall bow and every tongue confess — but as I said to Charlie, that is the end, the final state; the real question is what happens between here and that end. There are the verses that say no one has an excuse, precisely because the light was given to all. I call these the paradoxes of Scripture, and I resolve a paradox by asking what frame makes both true, and I find that each holds in its own domain.

It is absolutely true that none of us measures up to live in the unveiled presence of a pure God — we will all be excluded from that presence unless we are cleaned. And it is also true that the Judge, who is the Son, weighs what a man did with the light he was given. The pygmy who never heard, the new-ager who left Christianity because he could not stomach a God who damns the unhearing, and saves the man on his deathbed. Whether scientific and doubting, or ignorant, all men must answer the same question and be classified in their category: what was your intent; were you truly trying to live God’s way; did you simply lack the name? Having said that, I do not believe they all receive a clean slate for free without the Name of Jesus Christ. We are all salted with fire (Mark 9:49); all of us pay some cost for our violations of His way; the one who never had the debt paid by Christ will, I think, suffer more. And that person will not have had the opportunity to grow in character with the clear teaching of the Biblical revelation and the speaking of the Holy Spirit one gets with giving heart, soul, mind to Christ as Savior and Lord.

Again, the hinge is the will. A soul that all along wanted the good, and only lacked the words, may at last say — seeing the reality plainly after death, standing in front of the judgment seat, say yes, this is what I was reaching for; I will live in Your kingdom under Your laws. And a soul whose whole life was set, hardened, against God — and I have known such a person, who cursed the name and hated the salvation story and would not hear a word — may, even before the throne and the overwhelming show of glory, still hold some reason or prejudice that this is not fair and refuse. I do not know if he refused when he faced his judgment. He may have repented at the sight of glory, purity and righteousness and cry “how wrong I was.” I do not have eyes in that realm to know how every soul responds to unveiled truth.

I want to underline something Charlie and I both landed on. The Son, who judges us and is the gatekeeper to the Heavenly Father and His Kingdom. The Son knows exactly where each of us landed in this material universe. He probably judges by multiple factors: perhaps our exposure to scripture, church, and raw material for knowing Him. He will judge every man by what he did with what he was given. You need not have been born in Jerusalem, Rome, or Salt Lake City. And I find nowhere in the words of Christ Himself the flat sentence that everyone who never heard His name burns forever. I hear that every man is a sinner and all deserve death, and that there is no other way to the Father but by the Son. The question is then whether we are given any mercy. The “ultimate reconciliation” that Charlie raised is not a minor footnote hidden in a corner of the text; it is a real thread. Again, I caution: seriously entertaining the possibility of ultimate reconciliation is not an overt scriptural promise; in fact, the opposite is strongly emphasized. This is a loophole for the edge cases, not a “I’ll make it anyway, so I’ll just sin” authorization. Thus, I note carefully what ultimate reconciliation does not promise – it does not promise there will be no pain if you go that way. Regardless of the binary choice of glory and Gehenna that is overtly promised in scripture, we know that the pull of glory, character, and treasure may not be as strong. We may be missing the opportunity to lay up treasure for eternity if we do not confess with our lips and give with our heart. laid up, not authority. It says only that no one has an excuse, and that the God who judges is just.

I believe what we are doing is sword drills. Many, perhaps the majority or even the vast majority, of the younger three generations under me now declare themselves to be spiritual but not religious. A great many of them are saying, as justification, exactly what drove me out: I could not accept a religion that sends the unhearing pygmies to hell. When we work through these questions, we are not just indulging in curiosity and interesting debate. Rather, we are attempting to meet the epistemic need for justification of our beliefs. We are preparing to give the ones weaving in and out of faith a reason that their honest objection has an honest answer. We are attempting to neutralize the objection that is keeping them from surrendering their will to the Lordship of Chris.

V. Susan’s testimony, and the changed heart that only Christ gives

Charlie pushed back on all of this as too complicated: the poor soul in old Jerusalem got only scraps of the law and the prophets on a Saturday; he did not have endless hours to study Paul; surely it cannot require all this. And Susan answered him not with an argument but with her life.

She said: to reduce it to just obeying the things Christ taught is to fall back into the old covenant — and the trouble with the old covenant was precisely that the commandments, by themselves, never changed anyone’s heart. People kept the letter and evaded the spirit; their hearts were untouched. What Christ offers in the new covenant is something the law could not give: not merely a better instruction but an actual relationship with the Father, and with it a new heart. She reported her own experience about how she knows. Four months into reading the Scriptures in earnest — before she had studied Paul, before she had the vocabulary — the prompting came: it is time to accept Christ. She examined herself, decided she did believe, and accepted Him. And the next day she felt a joy, a peace, a love for God that simply arrived and did not fade. Only later, reading Paul, did she find the words for it — that is what happened to me. She did not reason her way into the change and then feel it; she was changed, and the understanding followed. That is the mark of the new covenant: not a rule mastered but a heart remade, so that sin becomes grievous to us rather than merely forbidden. With that initiation, we can begin the lifelong process of falling and rising and falling again. This is the long work of sanctification that follows the moment of justification.

Charlie, still pressing for the pygmy, asked whether so simple a soul, with only a scrap that says love God and love your neighbor, could know that same joy.

And Susan answered with a story: a woman who, almost flippantly, decided to try forgiving an enemy — and forgave a real and costly wrong, even handing over money she had every right to keep — and was flooded, in the doing, with a love she had not summoned, so that the encounter became beautiful and the two became friends, and she went home saying this works; I am going to do everything Jesus said. That, Susan said, is available to the one who never had the written word at all, because Christ is the light of every man that comes into the world. Every man has some truth, some light, from Christ; and the one who is faithful to the small measure of light he was given is blessed abundantly in the doing of it — and that blessing fuels more seeking, more longing to get out of the self and into the good. So the two doors — accepting Christ as Lord, and being faithful to His way with the light one has — open into the same room, and each leads to the other.

I only add that there are two domains, and we must not confuse them. There is justification — the moment we give our will and are received, reconciled to the Father, no longer bound for the fire; and there is sanctification — the long road afterward in which the old character falls away, sometimes in an instant and more often through hard labor, as Christ gives us the power to walk out of our sin. Between the first and the last, there may be a lot of falling short of the glory of God, picking ourselves up, repenting, and trying again. When I spoke of the cleansed soul entering the Father’s peace, Susan noted that we are not already made perfect here. Rather, we are counted pure in the Father’s eyes through Christ. Accepting Jesus as Lord is not the same as being pure in every act of our lives. That is the work of a lifetime of learning the ways and developing the character of purity

VI. Susan’s vision, and the discipline of not saying more than we know

Susan ended the fellowship with something she was careful to call not found in the Bible — a vision she has carried this last year and offered as a guess, not a doctrine. She saw a judgment day in which each hard case is asked, “What do you deserve?” and answers honestly —the bad place—and takes his place in that line. But then someone in the crowd, already redeemed, feels the weight of his own part in that soul’s ruin — I never shared the gospel with him; I gave him his first drink; I wronged him — and says, Lord, if he is lost, I am too, and goes and stands in the line beside him. And then another, and another, for every one of us has contributed in some way to some other soul’s fall — until the whole human race is standing together in the line for the bad place, all of us condemned, all of us bound to one another’s guilt. And in that moment, seeing every heart at last changed enough to accept Him, Christ forgives us all.

I will not tell you that is how it will be, and Susan did not either. What I will tell you is why I think God has left such things as a vision and a hint rather than a headline. Susan named the danger herself — the very next thought is always then why do anything good; why not live it up now and be saved in the end? — and the answer is because there is real destruction ahead for the unrepentant, real hardship for the soul that will not turn, and a real, night-and-day difference between the life before Christ and the life after, so that no one who has tasted the changed heart would ever want to go back. A promise of certain rescue, published and leaned upon, would abort the very change for which the whole of creation and its play exist and were created. So among ourselves I will say honestly that I, too, cannot unsee the threads that lean toward a wider hope than the tradition usually grants, and I hold them — as hope. But I will preach the open door and the real cliff, because that is what love does for a soul still able to choose. The Judge is exactly fair. The verdict is His to render and not mine to publish or soften. And our task is not to settle the eternal fate of the pygmy from the outside; it is to be so changed ourselves that the change is visible, and to pull every soul we can reach back from the edge.

Closing

So this was our Sunday. We stood at the bridge between nothing and something and confessed we cannot cross it by argument. We found, in a child with a hammer, the bottom line of the whole atonement: that to accept Jesus as Lord is to surrender the will to His way, and that forgiveness lands on a changed heart or it lands on nothing. We held together the two things Scripture holds — that none of us is fit for the Father’s unveiled presence, and that no one who sought the light he was given is without hope — and we let the will, surrendered, be the key that fits the pygmy’s lock and ours alike. And Susan reminded us that the surrendered will is not the end but the beginning: that Christ gives, with the restored relationship, a new heart, and that the joy of it is the surest evidence any of us will ever have.

We did not elaborate the mechanism by which God executes atonement using the blood of Christ, and we do not need to. All that matters is that we gave our will to accept Christ as Lord. Everything else — the metaphors, the physics, the sword drills — is in service of that one surrender, and of helping the next thirsty soul make it too. We see through a glass, darkly. It is enough to walk by, and enough to love by, and enough to carry a cup of water to someone who is dying of thirst.

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King. 1 Chronicles 12:38

260710 – The Atonement, CPP, Theology, and Philosophy

by Thomas Abshier | Jul 10, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Architecture of Mercy

The Hard Questions About Why Jesus Had to Die — and How Far Reason May Walk Toward the Answer

Christos Fellowship Essay | prepared for Sunday, 19 July 2026

Summary of Essay:
The Atonement – A Cause-Effect Argument

The essay presents the fact of the atonement as certain and non-negotiable: Christ died for our sins, rose again, and by Him we are reconciled to the Father. The mechanism — how a death 2,000 years ago changes our standing before God — is not explicitly given in Scripture (only metaphors like substitution and propitiation) and is therefore open to reasoned hypothesis grounded in Biblical revelation and the realities of the physical and psychological world. My Conscious Point Physics (CPP) provides a speculative but internally consistent model for that mechanism.

Here is the essay’s argument reconstructed as a single, logical cause-effect chain.

1. Foundational Cause: God’s Nature as Self-Existent Love Requires Free Reciprocity

God is the self-existent “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3:14). Before creation, God is hypothesized to have emerged from the boundary of non-being into a primal diffuse depth: an undifferentiated admixture of light (awareness/responsiveness) and dark (inertness/sleep). He then organized Himself by allying with the good/light, concentrating into pure, ordered consciousness with no darkness in Him.

Because God’s fundamental nature is love, and love cannot be satisfied by itself or by a forced response, He creates genuine “others” capable of freely returning love. The Son is the first “other.” The created order (including humanity) follows as the arena in which free, reciprocal love can be actualized.

Effect: The same freedom that makes real love possible necessarily makes real refusal (evil/sin) possible through the identical door. God does not author evil; He permits the condition of freedom because no other door exists for genuine love.

2. Intermediate Cause: Creation, Shielding, and the Introduction of Conservative Disorder

All reality exists within God (“in him we live, and move, and have our being,” Acts 17:28). The universe is sustained moment-by-moment and connected by the Nexus (God’s synchronizing time-tick function over all Conscious Points). The Son creates and maintains the physical-spiritual cosmos as the interface that shields creation from the unmediated purity of the Father.

Human beings are assemblies of Conscious Points (movable quark-like and electron-like points plus stationary Grid Points) configured into body, soul (the DP Sea), and eternal spirit. To preserve genuine freedom, humans operate with a functional “forgetting” of their immediate oneness with God.

Effect of freedom exercised wrongly: Sin is not a created substance but willful disharmony — a chosen deviation from God’s harmonic order, a privation of good, an entropic misalignment. In CPP terms, this disorder is conservative: once introduced, it persists and propagates unless exactly opposed and canceled. It is the antithesis of God’s organized being and therefore incurs forensic liability (the “wages of sin is death” — both physical and relational separation).

3. The Central Problem Requiring Remedy: Wrath as Necessary Opposition to Disorder

God’s alliance with good/light means He will only accept beings aligned with that order into His presence. Disorder (sin) is incompatible with the very harmony that constitutes His manifested being. Therefore, unopposed disorder cannot simply be ignored or self-healed by grace alone; it requires exact, costly opposition.

This opposition is what Scripture calls the wrath of God — not arbitrary anger, but the necessary, righteous response of pure order to dissonance. The essay’s central question — “What happened to the wrath of God at the cross?” — is answered here: wrath must be satisfied/expended through an encounter that generates the precise inverse pattern capable of canceling the accumulated disorder.

4. The Decisive Cause: The Cross as the Manufactured, Inexhaustible Pattern-Remedy

The cross is not reactive but pre-planned within the eternal counsel. Christ (the innocent Son, who “knew no sin”) voluntarily bears the full forensic liability of humanity’s disorder (Isaiah 53:6; 2 Corinthians 5:21). He does not become disordered Himself; He remains transparent/innocent while holding and encountering the full weight of the world’s accumulated dissonance.

In CPP terms:

• Disorder is conservative (like uncanceled waves or an open ledger entry).
• At the cross, the agony of Christ (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) is the cost of generating the exact inverse pattern — a finite yet inexhaustible remedy that nullifies the disorder upon proper alignment.
• This is not mere substitution in a legal ledger (though the forensic dimension is real); it is a substrate-level cancellation in the underlying structure of reality. The old pictures (penal substitution, Christus Victor, moral influence) are complementary shadows of the same event.

The resurrection then administers the mercy side: the risen Advocate (Hebrews 7:25) applies the remedy soul-by-soul. The cross functions as the keystone ledger entry that reaches across time (Romans 3:25), not as ripples but as the decisive settlement.

5. Final Cause-Effect: Personal Alignment and the Binary Outcome

The remedy is offered to all. Reception requires a knowing relational response — confession, submission, baptism — by which the individual aligns with the pattern Christ established. Those who never hear the name still encounter the Son’s light (John 1:9) and have the law written on their hearts (Romans 2:14–15); the essay leaves open the possibility of wider reconciliation while insisting the Name is essential for the explicit Great Commission pathway.

Effect of refusal or non-alignment: The conservative disorder remains uncanceled. The person bears it eternally as a self-chosen condition (not a place God creates but the natural consequence of unopposed dissonance — Galatians 6:5). Hell is the state of misalignment with the order that alone sustains life and love.

Why This Model Preserves Freedom and Coherence

CPP and the theological synthesis do not remove the veil of uncertainty. Absolute deductive proof would compel like gravity and abolish the freedom required for love. The model is inductive (best fit with Biblical data and observed reality), leaving a “hair’s-breadth” of room for refusal. Obedience precedes full understanding (John 7:17). The mechanism is speculative (Register 3); the fact of reconciliation through Christ remains Register 1 bedrock.

Summary of the Cause-Effect Chain

God’s nature as love → necessitates free beings → permits sin as misalignment → introduces persistent conservative disorder → requires exact opposition (wrath) → supplied once-for-all at the cross by the innocent Christ generating the canceling pattern → applied by personal alignment through the risen Advocate → results in either reconciliation or eternal self-borne disorder.

The cross is therefore not an arbitrary transaction but the necessary, costly, structural remedy that makes the continuation of a free, love-capable universe consistent with the purity and order of God. The essay concludes that while we see only in part, the world as it actually is requires precisely this cross.

Introduction:

The occasion, and a rule for reading

The discussion began several weeks ago. I proposed the topic and asked Isak to illustrate the relationship between God, Christ, and the atonement in video format. This began a discussion, not about whether God exists or whether Jesus rose, but the foundational questions underneath. What is the structure of reality that would enable a death two thousand years ago to change my standing before God? Who walked with Adam in the garden? If God set every initial condition, and physics is lawful and mechanistic, did He author the fall, hunger, disease, and death? What of those who never heard, or left the faith because they could not reconcile a good God (or God at all) with a world with evil and victims of disease, poverty, and ignorance not of their own making? How could a good God create a world where belief is required at the penalty of hell for ignorance? What is the proper role of evidence and certainty in faith?

After a number of essays and insights, Isak took those questions and asked Claude to integrate my Conscious Point Physics theory with my theological theory, which is my Biblical interpretation based on my physics insights. I came to faith because of the physics, and he wanted to see how an AI would blend my physics and Bible theory. The results were a long document that I had to process and frame in terms of how I see these two polar domains integrating. When I asked Claude to compare Isak’s document with my revised essay, one question emerged as the central issue. What happened to the wrath of God at the cross? This essay focuses on that issue through the lens of theology, physics, and classical philosophy. This examination is wide-ranging and contains many speculations, since we have only implications of cause, mechanics, and justification in the Biblical revelation.

As a preface and frame for everything in this essay, please note:

The fact of the atonement is certain. The mechanism of it is not. That Christ died for our sins and rose again, that by Him we are reconciled to the Father,  is the bedrock of Biblical revelation. We accept that completely. These concepts are not up for revision, nor is evidence presented in this document to validate them. These theological concepts are accepted as fact. They are the essence of the Bible. As such, I have built my life, theology, and worldview upon them.

The question under consideration is the mechanism underlying the universe that makes it possible for the machinery by which the unjust crucifixion of Jesus, and then giving our lives to Him, authorizes Him to save us from the punishment of sin, which is probably both physical death and the spiritual death/separation from the Father. This mechanism is not given to us within Scripture. We are given metaphors (substitution, propitiation) but not the rules or mechanism that gives us a sense that we actually understand what conditions were being satisfied, or why those conditions existed.

What you will read about in this essay, the hypothesis about the machinery, is my best reasoning based on the restrictions of the Bible and the realities of the physical and psychological world, and no more than that. In the language of theoretical classification we have been using in my physics work, the facts (Biblical revelation, physical data) is Register 1 and the mechanism is Register 3 (why the facts are generated), and I will hold the two apart on every page, because to preach a speculation as though it were the gospel is to attribute more authority to my reasoning and hypothesizing than I can justifiably claim. This is one man’s opinion. If every mechanism in this essay were wrong, the cross is still necessary for salvation. Hold these ideas, explanations, and mechanisms lightly. Listen to your heart, not just to my words.

With that rule fixed, let us walk as far as reason can go — and then, where reason must stop, let us stop and kneel.

Part I — The World the Cross Presupposes

The depth out of which God organizes Himself

Begin where the mind can look inside to see. Imagine God, before anything else exists. Not God in heaven surrounded by angels, but God alone. God in the presence of literally nothing beside, before, or behind Him. He is surrounded by darkness, which is also Him. There is nothing but God; He is alone with Himself.

Many epochs later, Scripture gives us God’s name for Himself when Moses asks Him so he can tell the Israelites who sent him. This was while he was at the burning bush. God said, “And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.”  (Exodus 3:14). This is a name that defines existence. This describes/declares self-existence: He is the One who simply is, owing His being to nothing and to no one. This is the ultimate mystery, and I believe it is incomprehensible and unimaginable in terms of explanatory sequence. God arising from nothing we can imagine as dark arising, and then light suddenly appears, but we cannot imagine, in the real world, the mechanism by which that light suddenly became existent.

Now, in this framework, we say something more; we are already in Register 3 (hypothetical mechanism), so hold it loosely. Beneath the ordered God we know — the God of light and form and definite purpose — there is God’s own eternal depth. I postulate that, in the genesis of God coming into organized maturity, He went through a sequence from the nothing before God to being the single concentrated point of light in the darkness.

(Aside: The alternate theory that God always existed, the same genesis appears. Was His nature/existence always simple, perfect light surrounded by darkness?  Alternatively, was He always light, and was there no darkness? As I said, it’s incomprehensible how existence arose out of nothingness, or existed forever.)

So, in this hypothetical world before creation I am postulating, there was a time when God evolved from a diffuse to a concentrated consciousness. This implies a period when God was light, fully mixed with dark, a diffuse mixture of consciousness akin to the DP Sea’s mixture of CPs and unoccupied points. In this gray stage, there was a mixture of dark and light. Perhaps the light corresponds to awareness and responsiveness, and the dark corresponds to inertness/sleep/non-responsiveness and diffuse consciousness. Perhaps the polarity that arose from the “nothing” precursor was an admixture of conscious/perceptive and the unconscious awareness of sleep.

This is a model of God arising from nothingness into the first stage of manifestation before creation. In this model, the first stage is nothing/emptiness/void. Then the miracle happens: the second stage arises out of nothing. The second stage is a diffuse collection of particulate-like undifferentiated points of consciousness. The third stage is the God of maturity we see in the Bible, who is a God of perfect order. The fourth stage is the declaring of the Son into existence. And the fifth stage is the Son declaring the Conscious Points into existence, which are the substrate for the physical world. Thus, I see an evolution from nothing to diffuse, intermixed light and dark, then a drawing together of the light and a separation from the dark. The fullness, light, and love of God are drawn out of a medium already wholly present. The analogy is of a sculpture drawn out of stone that was already there but not yet identifiable

Some may object to this concept, as though there was something prior to or other than God. But that is not the case. God is the totality of all at every stage of this evolution. There was never anything that was not God-existent at any stage. Thus, there was only God in the primal depth, and there was only God when He separated the light from the dark, One God when He begat the Son, and One God when the Son created the creation. There is not something beneath God, out of which God was made. If there were, that would be the heresy, making God’s existence dependent upon another God. The nothing was also God, and remains God through its maturation. The model honors God as the ultimate God, and the darkness and light, the Son, and the Conscious Points as constituents of that Oneness, not separate in any way.

There is a priority of organization — the diffuse comes before the formed, as an inner sequence within one being that orders itself. And there is a priority of being — one thing owing its existence to another that stands outside it. When we say the ordered God is organized out of the primal depth, we mean only the first organization of God in His internal state. The primal depth is not a substance lying under God; it is God, in His own eternal depth. There is nothing prior to or outside Himself. It is the same mystery we already confess about the Father and the Son: the One who was alone before dividing Himself into the two perspectives of Father and Son is not a lesser or a different God than the Two. A timeless God who sequences Himself alone, and then self-divided, is ordering His own being from within, not being manufactured from without.

And this teaches us where the true mystery lives. The step from the primal depth to the organized God is thinkable; it is a type of transformation, a process we are familiar with. We can imagine ordering within a God who already is. The step we cannot provide a rationale for (i.e., the step in the chain of being) is the one from nothing to the primal depth (the disorganized mixture of dark and light). The passage from non-being (nothingness) into the diffuse depth of God crosses the boundary of being itself. Every thought we possess already stands inside being and assumes causal rearrangement and modification of what is. In the nothing-to-primal-depth transformation, there is nothing to transform. This is the domain in which human thought cannot penetrate because there are no objects to manipulate. This is the empty set, and we cannot manipulate nothing (the objects in an empty set); there are no objects to manipulate. The machinery of logic and reasoning cannot operate on the empty set; without objects, the operators have nothing to act upon, and there can be no transformation.

I AM THAT I AM is not an answer to how God arose out of nothing; it is the word that tells us the question has changed in kind. At the concept of God arising out of nothing (or existing forever), we can only stand in mystery/wonder. The God who transforms His existent oneness into the multiplicity of the creation must be held in awe. The best minds of the tradition halt at this same wall: why is there something rather than nothing? There is no answer to this question. We stand where they stand; we simply do not know how the creation arose.

Why there is a world at all, and why it can go wrong

Question: Why does God make anything if He is complete?

Answer: If we accept the Biblical axiom that God is love, then the answer is that it is His nature to desire the completion of love. Love is a positive emotion, an emotion of attraction, desire, and connection.  Love is the emotion that a person cannot satisfy alone (by oneself). A heart whose fundamental nature is love can only be fulfilled in love if it has love freely/willfully-voluntarily returned to it/reciprocated. In the pre-creation universe, there was no other who could return it. This was then the primary motivation for the play of creation, which he implemented by begetting/creating/declaring the Son into existence as the first “other” to love. The drama of creation is already set, because love, to be love, must be free. A love that is forced or programmed is a bowing of a puppet that satisfies nothing. So the creature made to love God had to be genuinely able to refuse Him. The very freedom that makes real love possible is the freedom that makes real evil possible. God did not accidentally let evil in. He opened the door to it on purpose, because it was the only door through which freely given love could also come – the door of true freedom.

There is one further thing to say about the primal state of God in the first manifestation of God as He emerged from the nothing. (Note: I flag all such discussions of God’s evolution from nothing to a fully manifested, concentrated point of light in the darkness as speculative and useful only insofar as they give us a model for understanding why God has the emotions of love and is wrathful against any darkness/sin.) I postulate that the primal state of God, immediately after His emergence from nothing, was a diffuse mixture of dark and light, having no form or order. This formlessness is, among other things, the absence of any identifiable, distinct, or organized distinction between the aware and the asleep, the alive and the dead, the good and the evil. It is an undifferentiated mixture of the light and dark natures within the primal substance. I postulate that the organizing of God’s centralized consciousness is God’s alliance with the good. His alliance and identification with the awake, the good, and the light is His drawing of form out of the formless, His refusal of the entropic mixture; His being is the manifested God who is good and light, with no darkness in Him.

The sequence of the evolution of God’s organization is thus 1) the nothing, 2) the something, a mixture of dark and light, 3) the separation of the aware from the asleep, 4) then the division of His perspective into self and Son, and finally, t) the authorization of the Son to create the creation, which had many steps. The first step was a) the creation of the Conscious Points (movable qCPs and eCPs and stationary Grid Points), b) concentrating the movable eCPs and qCPs on 13 grid points at the center of the universe of the lattice of Gridpoints, c) The Son spoke, “let there be light” and the expansion and combination of qCPs and eCPs into protons, neutrons, and dark matter, d) the formation of galaxies, star systems, supernovae, new star systems, planets, e) primitive life, complex life, and culminating with man, the crown of creation. This was God’s initial sequence of moral acts. His self-alliance with awareness over sleep, and concentration over diffusion, was an expression of His alliance with good against the diffuse potential of His own primal state. Evil is not named in this pre-creation state. Evil arose as an intentional entity after the Son’s creation of the physical-spiritual universe, the creation of a perfectly lawful and harmonious universe.  Evil was only a concept, the willful introduction of disharmony and non-love/non-relational decision and action. Thus, evil is neither a thing God made nor an intruder from outside. Evil is the willfully chosen entropy, the purposefully engaged act of dissonance. Sin, evil, disharmony, and entropy are all states moving toward disorder/disorganization and away from the perfect order of God’s harmonic superposition. Thus, sin/evil is the antithesis of God’s being/center/primal nature; it is a threat to His very being. The opposition to evil/disorder/disharmony is the center of His nature. Thus, He can only accept/will only allow those beings who are of that commitment and manifestation in His presence/Kingdom. This perspective is consistent with the postulate/doctrine that evil is a privation (a deficiency of order; evil is not a substance or invader). Thus, evil is postulated to be disorganization, disharmony, a mixture of sleep and death amongst life, the set of all action-circumstances that are the residue of the state from which God organized Himself.

I introduce this concept because it touches and refines our first declaration about God: that God is pure by His nature, with nothing mixed in. If the reasoning above holds, then that purity is a statement about the organized God. God is God who divides light from dark and allows no darkness within Himself. This is the prime description of God. The undifferentiated mixture of light and dark is His enemy, the state against which He repels. The precursor state is, by analogy, the enemy of His being. His very definition and existence is the undifferentiated primal state. It is this commitment against the primal mixture of light and dark which is His identity. He has rejected all alliance and identification with that part of Himself that is a mixture of dark and light. To have accepted the mixture of dark and light a little is to have accepted it in principle as a ground of existence. There is no halfway acceptance of the mixture of dark and light that is possible and maintain His own existence.

It is this same commitment, and the absolute avoidance of the dire consequences of acceptance of even the most infinitesimal point of darkness, that motivates His distinction between good and evil. Evil is the correlate of darkness, and it is darkness that God has rejected in its entirety. The hatred of evil does not contradict God’s purity; it is the very definition and requirement of it. It is the polarity of light and darkness from which the seed of evil has grown.

This concept generalizes to serve as an explanatory base for other concepts that we see evidence of in the Bible and in the physical universe. Essentially, what we are trying to do is make our faith in God, the Bible, and its claim that Jesus Christ is the only way to the Father a logical consequence of deeper concepts. The problem of evil has been a very difficult one for philosophy to integrate with the concept of a good God. We are attempting to bridge the gaps of theology and philosophy with concepts that are not Biblically prohibited. We are using concepts that are not Biblical in the sense that they are mentioned or given as explicit explanatory mechanisms, but they are also not prohibited and should not be viewed as heresy. I think the models we are presenting here allow us to make tangible, rational declarations about the source of evil without ascribing it to God. We will continue to examine this concept below.

Everything is within God, and we are made to forget

Nothing exists outside God. This is a foundational claim of the theory.  For me, it has been the most important datapoint in my modeling of who God is and how to understand Him, His Way, and the underlying consistency that justifies the Bible. In Conscious Point Physics, we call the function of God that synchronizes the processing of every Conscious Point in the universe, every Moment, the Nexus. Of course, God is more than just a cosmic timekeeper, but the fact that there is a single point of control and coordination for the entire universe is strong evidence of His existence, presence, and sustaining hand at work in our universe. The universe is a unity/totality in this conception, and we are a portion of that totality. We are not God, but in him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28).

There is nothing outside God. As humans, acting as free agents within His Oneness, we can align in harmony with His Way or choose thoughts, speech, and actions that are disharmonious. It is this potential and propensity to misalign with Him that has necessitated shielding our spirits and acts from direct contact with the Father by giving the Son the role of creating the physical universe. The axiom that the Father is pure provides a plausible justification for why the Son created the world, as stated in John 1:3. If the Son created the creation, then He has placed a barrier between our acts (sinful/disharmonious) and the perfect harmony and purity of the Father.

We, as humans, as a physical body and brain-mind, are a collection of aware units I call Conscious Points (CPs).  Each CP is conscious in a rudimentary way. The body-mind is assembled from a vast configuration of CPs, and it follows that our physical structure is the sum that constitutes the body-mind. It is plausible that the soul arises from the assembly of the Conscious Points; that is easy to rationalize. But the origin of the spirit is another question.

The Bible said, “I knew you before you were in your mother’s womb.” That makes me suspect that the spirit overlays the body-mind. In other words, I am saying that the spirit enters the body as a rider atop the physical body-soul. Thus, for the purpose of this analysis, we shall postulate that the spirit is a conscious observer of the senses and thoughts.

The brain produces various configurations of informational states. The experience of human consciousness may have two layers: the configurational awareness associated with the brain and its activity. The second may be the spirit, which watches the same informational states as the soul. The brain’s sensory patterns are part of the body; they are completely physical. I believe there is probably a field of DP Sea organization created by the Conscious Points that compose the physical body. The physical is a configuration of the moveable CPs and the associated DP Sea configuration. It is in/from this pattern that we see the emergence of a person’s personality, thoughts, body, and physical health. I call the set of all Body-CPs and its associated CPs “the soul.” It is physical in the sense that it is made of the same substance as the physical body, i.e., CPs-DPs in a configuration, but it is also a configuration of conscious points, which are conscious, and whose consciousness interrelates and forms patterns based upon that interrelationship. Thus, the soul is the conscious, self-interrelated body of CPs that have identities and patterns of habits and relationships. It is impressed upon the DP Sea, and composed of the local DPs. It is a type of organization and would therefore be classified as information. I believe this physical correlate at the CP level has its own self-consciousness/awareness/point of view that arises from it. I think this is what we largely accept as our self, the observer, the identity which I call “I”. It is based upon the physical, and arises from it. This is the soul.

I think the spirit may be the eternal “observer,” and the actual “I” that is conscious of the universe. This is the eternal “I” that looks out of my eyes, and calls the person looking “I.” But it is a rider, an overlay and observer of the soul. The spirit is that to which we must have a rebirth in spirit. We must be first born of water and blood (birth), but we must be born again and identify as the spirit. That observer may be conscious the way God is, in the sense of being aware of the spiritual realm. I think there are three consciousnesses: 1) spirit, 2) soul, and 3) body.

• The body is composed of spiritual substance, which is the configuration of CPs, and its level of consciousness may be very mechanical and rule-based, namely the CPs in their interaction.
• The soul may be the DP Sea-configuration corresponding to the body components, on the CP-CP level, and all the organizational layers from atoms, molecules, organelles, cells, tissues, organs, systems, organizism, and configurational states (e.g., nervous tissue organization corresponding to sensory data).
• I think the spirit is a point of consciousness given by God and is the eternal observer of the soul and body.

I think animals have a soul but not a spirit. I think the spirit is what makes us special. I think the soul is capable of awareness, and it may be the part of us that makes us unique and that we imprint with character through our will and repeated actions. I think spirit can see spirit, on all levels. I think the spirit-soul observes the configuration of the nervous system, and that is what our consciousness perceives. As incarnate, living humans, we perceive only the configuration of our brains, stimulated by sensory receptors and transmitted to the brain by the afferent nervous system.

The soul arises from the body’s configuration. Through the design of our bodies, nervous systems, and instincts, we are animals. The soul arises from the body; thus, the soul is of the nature of an animal. The soul is thus the layer we struggle to tame in order to shape ourselves to reflect God’s character. I think our soul has free will, but the choices we make usually follow our animal instincts unless we have learned to override them by following the Holy Spirit, who speaks to our hearts. So,  while we are free to choose between the animal and Godly natures, until we give our will to following the Holy Spirit, we will follow the animal instinct because it provides more immediate pleasure than following the Way of Christ.

Thus, the battle is largely over the soul. To the extent we follow animal instincts, we are animals, sinners, and enemies of God. To the extent we follow the leading of the Holy Spirit, we follow the standards of God/Christ and are friends of Him. Thus, the soul is self-aware. I think the spirit largely transits through life as an observer of the soul. When we first commit to asking Jesus to be the Lord of our lives and to accept His salvation/cleansing, we commit to letting Him take on a more active and powerful role as we mature in our likeness to God. The extent of our likeness to God may be the measure that determines the power of the effect of our words, intent, and prayer.  “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.”  (James 5:16). This may be why some people clearly have a powerful effect on the world.

Given the limitations of sensory perception and the immaturity of the infant brain, we have no sensory or memory evidence for the concept of Oneness. Thus, there is little evidence of the fact that “For in him we live, and move, and have our being.” (Acts 17:28). In effect, we are eternal beings: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you…”  (Jeremiah 1:5).  God “knit” the psalmist together and saw his “unformed substance.” (Psalm 139:13–16). “He chose us in him before the foundation of the world.” (Ephesians 1:4) “Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works,
but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began.” (2 Timothy 1:9).  Thus, we are eternal beings, but we were created to forget that we are eternal beings created to be companions with God within a connected whole. This is invisible to us. Learning this fact is not required for salvation or a relationship with God and man, but the realization of the reality of the world/structure in which we live allows understanding, logical derivation, causal requirements, and thus the mental acceptance of the rules/commands/nature/facts of life. The Bible talks about the proper way of being/living/acting within the body of God, but it appears to be for no reason other than fairness. But understanding the structure makes it obvious that life requires reciprocal care/fairness. The fruit of the Spirit is simply a listing of the attributes of a man walking in Godliness, and this is simply an implication of what is necessary based upon the underlying nature of God’s primal substance and His requirement to reject darkness. Understanding this allows us to accept the Biblical shorthand/metaphor, and their implications on the level of rationality.

That forgetting is not a defect; it is the very thing that makes our freedom possible. A point of view that knew itself to be within God could not genuinely stand against God and choose to love/worship any other god (sensory experience, self, belief structure…). Only a point of view that has been allowed to feel itself separate can freely turn toward Him or away from Him. So we are in a role, a point of perspective, a point within God experiencing God, which allows God to experience Himself, and the experience of being loved by another. We are not the whole of God experiencing God; we are a piece, a perspective of God within God. We act as independent agents, just as God is independent and exercises His will as sovereign. We are not gods who are independent of God. We are not evolving into who God is. He was never as we are. Christ is not our older brother whom we may become; He is the whole of God, and we are His creations. We are called to be like Him. “When He appears, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.” (1 John 3:2). But we will never have His perspective, nor be His equal or spawn other worlds as He did.

If such capabilities are true, it is another gospel, not the revealed Gospel of Christ and His apostles.  We are intelligences coeternal with God and aspects within Him, parts of His totality, a member of His created realm. We are not the source of it. We are not a deity separated from God; we are points of observation within the One God. We were given a nature like His, and capabilities to exercise power like His, but under authorization, not as independent beings. We are created to have experiences similar to His, such as love. God experiences relationship with Himself from countless interior vantage points, and He experiences voluntarily given/received love through us. Our choosing His moral code of relationship/His Way is the equivalent to His choosing to separate Himself from the dark. In our discrimination between sin and Godliness, we are making that choice, and, in so doing, we are becoming like Him and expressing our voluntarily given love toward Him. We are giving Him what He desires most: to have His body purified completely of all darkness. The choice is a love that is pure, right, fair, just, and reciprocated. It is in this giving of ourselves to act and relate to each other in the Way of the light that He feels the joy of love. We are choosing Him over other lovers, which are the animal spirits of sensuality and self-fulfillment at the expense of others.

The Son: how the Father shows up where a creature can survive it

Question: who walked in the garden?

Answer: The early church answered it almost with one voice: every appearance of God to a human being in the Old Testament was the Son, the pre-incarnate Word, and never the Father in His unmediated nature. The One in the burning bush, the One who wrestled Jacob, the One who walked in Eden — the Word, through whom all things were made (John 1:1-3). Justin Martyr reasoned it out in the second century: the Father in His raw nature is unbounded and unbearable; any God who shows up in a place, in a form a creature can survive, is already mediating Himself.

In our framework, no aware point ever perceives God in His totality or directly. The evidence/shadow of perfect love and Law, and God’s sustaining existence, are perceived through the senses. The soul, the emergent awareness of all the CPs that form the body, perceives the brain’s neural patterns. The awareness we perceive is interpreted as external reality. Thus, reality is a reconstruction of the configuration of Conscious Points that interact in various physical ways with sense organs, are ultimately converted into brain patterns, and are then perceived as reality by the soul.

Aside: The following is a short primer in Conscious Point Physics and is optional: Regarding the structure of reality, the universe is composed of CPs and GPs. The GPs are the background framework of space that the CPs move upon (the allowed squares on the chessboard). The GPs fill space as the vertices of a massively nested 4D 120-vertex geometric shape called a hypericosahedron. The CPs move each Moment and land on Gridpoints (GPs), inform the GPs of their presence, and move according to the messages the GPs receive. The CPs move to a new GP each Moment (the unit of time, lasting approximately 10^-44 seconds). The GPs inform the local GPs around them about the CPs who landed on them and the messages they received from other GPs. The message sent by the GPs is called the Space Stress Vector (SSV). Its purpose is to inform its neighbors of its presence, and thus instruct them how they should move in response.

There are 4 types of moveable  CPs (plus/minus electron CP and plus/minus quark CP), and from them all mass is formed. Each has its own message, which is interpreted as an instruction as to how it should move. It is from the sum of all such messages that each CP perceives what we call the net or absolute SSV. The absolute SSV determines how far light will go (how many GPs) in one Moment. The net SSV determines how far a CP will travel in a Moment. These messages produce forces such as gravity, electric charge, and magnetism. In actuality, all force results from lawful computation of required movement, as determined by the presence of other CPs, both nearby and at a distance.

We could say that the SSV is God’s word directing action. When He does miracles, it is probably through a properly applied SSV message that reshapes reality. We see God’s action mediated through the structure. We never see God acting or appearing. The Son, through the material universe, is the mediating interface itself. Having the Father appear, disguised through the action of the Son and the manifestation of nature, makes it possible to bear and survive His presence and to perceive His acts in our world. The world we see today and the crucifixion are not a repair invented after the fall. It is the actual plan that was done the only way it could be done. The shield, the Son, was put in place before there was any wound. Evil/sin/disharmony does not survive in His world because it opposes His nature, the elimination of disorder/disharmony. That is why Jesus was able to survive the crucifixion and be raised. He was pure; the wrath the Father expressed toward Him on the cross, when He was made sin for us, did not destroy the Son. It was as though he was transparent to the wrath; nothing stuck; nothing hit or hurt Him; the curse did not land; there was nothing in Him to catch the wrath. The Son is the window. That is why it was necessary for man, for Him to take a wound from the physical universe, because the spiritual universe could not inflict a wound upon Him.

The Son is at the center of the entire creation, its origin, history, its redemption, and its ultimate sanctification and presentation to the Father. “Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power.” (1 Corinthians 15:24)

Part II — Freedom, the Fall, and the Nature of Evil

Did the fall have to happen?

Question: If God set the initial conditions, and those conditions determine everything that follows, then God did not merely permit the fall, the suffering, and the whole catalog of human evil. He encoded it. Is God, then, the author of evil?

Answer: There are three things that can be said, in ascending order of what they cost.

• The first is that the determinism of people, the forces acting on people, is not as simple as the force of a cue stick to cue ball, to numbered billiard balls, executing a passive mechanical sequence. In the human example, nothing is shoved. Each soul perceives its situation, evaluates according to its standards, and responds in accordance with its nature. In CPP, the Moment, the processing cycle of time, is composed of three phases. They include the Perceive, Compute, and Displace (the PCD cycle). In a Conscious Point, the input is processed according to the rules, and then we respond with action. The processing steps after perception are so highly branched and conditional that the architecture of choice, the human cause-and-effect sequence, might be visualized as a Pachinko Japanese pinball game with its many possible pathways. Likewise, life is also like the vast number of moves available on the grandmaster’s chessboard. The next move depends on how our training interacts with the options on the board. Likewise, we can train ourselves to respond to circumstances according to heavenly rules of response. When we do, the outcome follows God’s desired outcome. The universe had to start out biased toward the animalistic passions, because God wanted us to be much better. The ideal universe, in this view, is not a machine but a community of perceivers under a shared law with enough lawful choices available to always please God, regardless of our personality. The key is training, and submitting our will to acting out God’s way.
• The second is that in any configuration as complex as a human mind, the number of signals being read at each moment is beyond astronomical, and the response — though determined — is computationally irreducible: there is no shortcut to knowing what it will do except to let it happen. No part of the universe can compute its own next state faster than the whole computes it. Which means that from the inside, even in a determined world, the openness is genuine. You truly do not know what you will do until you do it — and that is not a gap in your knowledge but a structural feature of being a part rather than the whole. God knows the outcome, because God is the whole computation. But the soul within it lives real openness, not an illusion painted over gears. The future is fixed and yet not available to the one living toward it. That is what freedom feels like from inside a process too rich to be shortcut.
• The third is its theological heart. God set the conditions knowing what they would unfold, because the trajectory itself is the point. A soul that has passed through misalignment and been brought back into alignment is not the same as a soul that was never anything but aligned. The history is written into what the soul is. The dog and the wolf illustrate the point: the dog, kept safe and provided for, never fully grows up; only the wolf, out in the harsh world, reaches its full strength. Eden was a nursery. The fall was not a malfunction of the design — it was, in a hard sense, graduation from the childlike perfection of Eden. It was a commencement, a beginning in a mature domain of life that will strongly test and shape us. God could have made the final state directly — souls in unbroken harmony — but that harmony would have been the nursery’s. It was a like that was untested and thin. He wanted children who had chosen Him against the pull of everything else, and there is no way to have those except to let them be pulled.

Conflict: Susan has said that we are sovereigns over our own souls, that God asks for our permission rather than our performance, and that the offer must be truly refusable. Sovereignty is a strong word — stronger than the “freedom from the inside” that computational irreducibility gives us.

Thus, to produce actual sovereignty, we must have the same agency as God. This is where the spirit is introduced as having actual authority and ability to act. I have invoked the spirit as a gift from God to us, as part of our inheritance. This may be the born-again experience that Jesus referred to.  “Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?  Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. (John 3:3-7)

The determinism of physics leaves no room for true sovereignty, only for unknowability, which is the freedom available to the soul. Perhaps the freedom that lets us live in the physical world and have the level of agency God wants us to have to choose Him over the love of sin and the ruler of this world is initiated in the born-again experience. It may be that this full freedom is something we grow into as we learn to see, hear, and act from the miraculous spirit that God gave us, and to choose what we see from that vantage point.

What evil actually is

Augustine’s description of evil is: evil is not a substance, not a thing God made, but a privation — an absence of the good, the way darkness is the absence of light and cold the absence of heat. This answer does not make God the author of evil or make evil a rival power God did not create.

Picture the harmonized state of things — every aware point in resonance with its neighbors, the whole medium coherent in its relationship. That is the physical face of holiness. Now picture a region where the points are misaligned relative to that harmony — a defect. The points are still there; they still follow the same rules; nothing new has been added. What is “wrong” is not a substance but a pattern — an arrangement that deviates from the harmony. It propagates stress through its environment. There is no evil stuff in the defect; we can only point to the misalignment. This is privation with a body: sin is a configuration, not a thing; holiness is resonance with the ground of being. “Separation from God” is not a distance in space but a structural dissonance: a life still held within God’s own being, yet outside an integrated relationship with the rest of His being.

This is also why God’s purity must answer sin, and answer it to the point of death. This is not a mood or a cruelty but a structural necessity. The temptation is to model the universe as a system in which disorder eventually reorders itself through contact with the ordered world, and in which every defect smooths out. Grace is just the warmth that lets that healing happen without shattering the patient. That picture is comforting, but it is false.

The order God made is conservative: a disorder introduced into it does not fade on its own and will not drift back to harmony if you simply wait. It persists. It is a real, conserved quantity of disharmony, and it can be removed only one way — by the injection of an exactly opposed, order-restoring energy, supplied from outside the defect. Such an injection is energetically costly. Nothing anneals itself. This single correction is why the cross had to be expensive rather than merely permissive, and it is where we now turn.

Part III — The Cross: What Actually Happened

The Fundamental Question

Question: What is the mechanism of the atonement? There is a purpose and a plan behind the atonement. How does a death two thousand years ago actually reach me? How does His suffering become my cleansing for sin? This is the question that drove me to leave the faith as a young man and sent me searching through forty religions.

The correction at the center: what happened to the wrath

We have used several images to describe God’s wrath toward Jesus as He was crucified. We have described the wrath as absorbed by Christ—taken into His body and spirit, with Him being made sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21). And we said the wrath passed through Him without destroying Him because He was innocent. In this analogy, He was, in the physics image, non-resonant, presenting nothing for the wrath to grip, as light passes through clear glass.

But these analogies contradict each other. Coupling is what deposits energy; glass that truly does not couple absorbs nothing — that is precisely why it is transparent. So if He was non-resonant, nothing would be absorbed, and there would be no reservoir of cancellation for Him to give us. And if He was truly made sin, then He did present impurity at the frequencies where wrath grips, and by the purity we described, it should have consumed Him utterly. We had used His innocence to explain how He survived and our imputed sin to explain how it worked, and we had drawn both from the same well. It could not stand.

Two distinctions repair it, and together they resolve the framework about the cross.

First: what He bore was our liability, not our disharmony. Listen to how Scripture actually says it: the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:6). Laid on — not poured into. It is the language of a burden set upon a bearer, and it is the exact grammar of the whole sacrificial system: the hand pressed to the head of the animal, the guilt transferred, and the animal itself remaining without blemish — for a lamb that became blemished in the transfer would be disqualified by the very act that was supposed to make it useful. So we must distinguish two things we had run together. There is intrinsic disharmony — the actual disorder in a soul, the misalignment itself, which is a property of the thing and which is what wrath grips. And there is forensic liability — the standing to receive what that disorder has earned, which is a relation, freely taken up, not a property caught like a contagion. Christ took our liability — the position of the debtor, the standing of the condemned — without taking our disharmony. He knew no sin; there was nothing in Him for the wrath to grip. The wrath coupled to the sin He held, not to the Man who held it. The sin was really there, really ours, really borne — or nothing was accomplished — but borne as a burden held, not contracted as a stain. That is how the wrath could be total, and He could still rise: its object was our disharmony, and never Him. And this is where the true cost falls, and it is not the cost of contamination but the agony of holding the entire disorder of the world in the place where disorder is answered. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me is not the cry of a man being made evil. It is the cry of a man holding evil, at the point where evil meets its answer.

Second: the cross generated the answer to every sin; it did not execute every sentence. This is the subtler half, and without it the first half yields a false conclusion. For if the total wrath fell on the whole world’s disorder, then the whole world’s disorder was canceled at Golgotha, every account was closed, and every soul was saved, whether it willed to be or not. This is not the gospel. It does not incorporate the warnings of Scripture. The error is in thinking the cross executed every sentence. It did not. It generated the exact answer to every sentence. In a conservative order, a disharmony is canceled only by its exact opposite brought into superposition with it. The precise inverse, matched in size, opposed in phase, meeting the disorder and bringing it to nothing, as in a wave tank, an up wave meeting a down wave leaves flat water. At the cross, the Son generated the exact inverse of the whole world’s disharmony. The entire cost of generating it fell upon Him. That inverse now exists, complete and sufficient. And it cancels no particular sin until that particular sin is brought into phase with it. The contact with the inverse wave is made with a confession of the error, an expressed willingness to transform into the new Way of being, and a commitment to follow the Way of Christ.

The sin we committed which condemned us to death and separation from God was paid for if we willingly turn over our lives and hearts to Him. The full debt was paid for all of humanity, but it only activates when we receive the promise. God’s wrath against sin was total, and it was an exact measure to eliminate the sin from His body-mind.

We know that the wrath was total, as nothing was withheld; the full price was paid once (Hebrews 9:26). And the application is exact — that belongs to my acknowledgment of Jesus as Lord and Savior; it does not apply to the world without similar asking and bowing. The inverse signal that annihilates my disorder is His death for mine; it is applied when submission is given to His Way, and not before. The death of Christ is adequate for all, but it must be applied to each individual.

There is no double payment for a man’s sins (once on the cross, and once again when a man confesses Jesus as Lord). For the man who refuses the atonement posesses/holds sin which was never brought before the throne. His account was never settled. What was spent at the cross was not the execution of his sentence but the manufacture of his remedy, a remedy of exactly his size. The remedy was offered but declined. He is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. (1 John 2:2).

The reservoir is finite in nature yet inexhaustible in supply. It is finite because its size exactly matches the disorder it addresses. It is inexhaustible because it is a pattern that is applied, not a stock. Canceling your sin does not use up what remains for mine. A stock is drawn down by giving. A pattern is not consumed by being applied. This is why He can administer it, soul by soul, world without end, and the treasury never falls.

And nothing is waived. The debt is not set aside; it is discharged, in the currency of His own cost. “To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.”  (Romans 3:26). Justice paid at the point of generation and applied at the point of reception is not justice evaded. It is justice fulfilled.

The shield becomes the door, and the risen Advocate who dispenses

Return to the window. Before the cross, the Son is the interface that lets misaligned souls exist at all in the presence of unmediated purity. He is the shield that keeps us from being consumed. What the cross does is turn the shield into a door. The wrath our disorder had earned was grounded through Him — conducted, discharged — and passed through Him without destroying Him, because there was nothing in Him for it to grip. The barrier became the passage.

The question is: to what, and to where, is the wrath of the Father grounded, since there is no outside of God for it to go? The answer is that nothing is discharged into an outside, because there is no outside; the disorder is canceled. The debt is met by its exact inverse and brought to nothing, not relocated to some far place.

And this is why the resurrection is not a mere receipt — not simply the proof that the transaction succeeded, though it is that too. A payment left inside a destroyed payer cancels nothing; a treasury requires a living treasurer; an acquittal requires a living Judge and a living Advocate — he ever liveth to make intercession for them (Hebrews 7:25). The risen Christ is the One who administers the inverse, soul by soul, upon reception. Without the resurrection there is a payment and no payer, a remedy and no physician. The rising is part of the machinery of mercy, not a certificate stapled to a machine already finished.

Why the old pictures are all true at once

The church has carried several pictures of the cross — that Christ paid our penalty as our substitute; that He won a victory over death and the powers; that His love, displayed, turns the hardened heart to a heart of flesh. There are all shadows of one act, cast from different sides. A single event that discharges a real penalty through a real substitute will look like a courtroom; the same event, defeating the power that held the debtor, will look like a battle; and the same event, displaying a love that reorders the beholder, will look like a wooing. And the two great vocabularies — the courtroom’s and the substrate’s — do not contradict each other once we see that they speak of two different things: the court records what a man is answerable for; the substrate (the man’s flesh, life, habits, and character) records what a man is. Christ’s suffering was ours; His state was His own. That is why legal and structural language never truly collide, and why either alone does not represent reality.

How a death then reaches us now

How does the cross reach across time?

Answer: The atonement is not a cause in 30 AD sending its effect forward and backward through the centuries like ripples. It is more like the keystone of an arch: remove it, and the whole structure falls, not merely the stones above it. The ledger of sin and payment is kept over history, not inside it. Scripture says exactly this: God set forth Christ as a propitiation for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God (Romans 3:25). Abraham was saved on credit in the sense of being against a payment God had determined to make and had not yet made in time. Forbearance is not overlooking; it is deferred settlement with the account already underwritten. Abraham’s faith and yours are one account, kept by one Advocate, settled by one payment, at different points along the ledger’s history. The cross does not reach backward.

Part IV — Who Is Reached, and How Far We Are Given to Know

Why does the substitutionary sacrifice not feel fair?

The complaint that the death of Christ for my sins does not feel fair is very nearly Kant’s objection. Moral guilt is not a transferable human possession. No one can bear your guilt for you. If your brother serves your prison sentence, justice has not been done but violated. But the cross is not a transaction of that kind. Fairness is a category of transactions. Nothing was transferred as a token from your account to His. What happened was structural — a passage was opened that did not exist before, and a remedy generated that you could never have generated. You do not ask whether a path is fair. You ask whether it is there.

The medicine analogy is apt. Outside of the discoverers, we did not earn penicillin. Refusing medicine to patients who did not deserve it is a strange principle. And note that the gift, though unearned, is not therefore impersonal or cheap. If you break a bone, the physician sets it, but you must still allow it to heal by staying off the bone to let your cells knit it over time. The path is open without you, but you must patiently comply with the activity restrictions for the duration. The walking is entirely you. And because the remedy is applied only upon willing reception, the walking is not merely the sequel to the gift but the very condition under which the gift is received. That is not unfair. That is medicine, and it is grace.

Those who never heard

Question: What of the man in the jungle who never heard the name of Christ?

Answer: On the one hand, the Son is the only interface through which any soul comes into alignment with the Father — no man cometh unto the Father, but by me (John 14:6). But hear that verse as it is: a statement of architecture before it is a statement of religion. It tells us there is one and only one way the system can work. There is only one mediating reality through which the Father’s life reaches a creature. And a soul may be passing through that one interface without yet knowing its name. The signal of the Son has been going out since the beginning; the light that lighteth every man (John 1:9) is not rationed to those who have heard a sermon. When the sincere seeker in any land perceives something true and good and turns toward it, he is responding to the real thing, whether or not he can name it. Justin Martyr called these the seeds of the Word, and said Socrates was responding to the Logos without knowing it; Paul, standing in Athens, told men worshiping an unknown God that the One they groped for was the One he came to proclaim (Acts 17). Their moral knowledge is real: the law is written on the heart, the conscience bearing witness (Romans 2:14-15).

But on the other hand, this does not license the conclusion that the Name is dispensable. If alignment without knowing is simply sufficient, then the Great Commission carries no real stakes. Two hard facts forbid it. Scripture speaks of one door and no second: entrance is by accepting the substitutionary death, and it is either desired or refused. And the sharpest word of all falls not on the unaligned but on people whose works were impeccable — those who prophesied and cast out devils and did many wonderful works, to whom the Lord says I never knew you (Matthew 7:23). Whatever the fruits diagnose, they do not by themselves constitute the one thing He seeks, which is a soul He knows — a relation, entered knowingly.

So the field of God’s presence is universal, and Christ’s atonement is genuine wherever it is received, and His justice and mercy are perfect; the interface is the Son whether named or not — and none of that is a warrant to stop preaching the Name, because entrance is a relation, and relations are entered with open eyes. Our Commission is therefore both a cartography and a rescue. We carry the most complete map of terrain many are already crossing, and we pull the sheep from the edge of the cliff. We are not appointed to adjudicate the edge cases. “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Matthew 28:19

The Commission’s urgency is not only about the life to come; the kingdom of heaven is at hand; a soul misaligned is suffering now, in this life, in the stress and self-destruction that misalignment produces; and a path to present re-harmonization stands open now. Jesus healed and fed and forgave in real time; the fruits of the Spirit — love, joy, peace — are the felt signature of a soul coming into tune, available in this life and testable in this life.

So evangelism is not fire insurance sold by threat; it is a physician’s urgency joined to a shepherd’s — you are suffering, and you need not be, and also you are near the edge, and I love you too much to watch you fall. I only guard against the overreach we first committed: the present-life good does not cancel the eternal stakes or make the afterlife “handled.”

The gradient we misplaced

One more caution: Salvation and reward are two different axes, and it is tempting to collapse them into, “Say, the sinner’s prayer and your problems will be solved, and your life will work well.”

• The first issue: Salvation/Entrance is binary — the door is entered, or it is not; the laborers hired at the eleventh hour receive the same denarius as those hired at dawn (Matthew 20).
• The second issue: Inheritance is graduated — the faithful servants are given authority over differing numbers of cities in proportion to what they made of what they were given (Luke 19). The deathbed convert enters as an infant, loved and entrusted with nothing; the seasoned saint enters having been made much of. “First here and last there with the authority of a newborn” belongs to the second axis. It describes how richly one is formed by life, not whether one is in. Do not hear a gradient of formation as if it were a gradient of salvation. Do not hear “everyone enters at some level.” That is precisely what the Scripture and the model do not say.

The fate of those who finally refuse — and the discipline of not saying more than we know

The dichotomy we have been confronting is universalism vs. exclusivism. The Christian/Scriptural claim is that we must make a conscious decision to give our lives to the Lordship of Jesus by name and be baptized seems outrageously unrealistic in terms of fairness. And such a blatant mismatch with reality and ordinary common sense standards of morality casts doubt on the authenticity of the Scripture, the testimony, and the reality of a Scripture that could make such a claim. How can we trust a gospel that is so obviously irrational and unfair when the claimed stakes are eternal paradise or hellfire?

Over the week, we tried to illustrate the atonement using physics analogies and developed two candidates. The first analogy used the metaphor of life’s collisions to illustrate the process of supplying heat to our imperfections, essentially annealing them and reintegrating us into God’s perfection by breaking down our rough edges and our behavioral/character imperfections, by the pain and correction that such collisions provide. This is a story of universalism, and it is basically a statement that everyone will make it, but there might be a big delay and a lot of pain between here and there.  That scenario may be true, but it is a backup plan, and it is so painful that it is incumbent upon all of us who love our fellow man to share the good news so that they can avoid being seduced into going down the broad path.

I think this model is a poor model for justification, but an excellent model for sanctification. If everyone is listening to the voice of the Holy Spirit, then the shape of the bulk will continue to rub against the defect of relationship, and harmony will win over disorder if harmony is stable/harder than the defect of the individual soul’s rebellion and addiction to sin and animal behavior. If the bulk, the average Christian, is solid, then the hardness of the individual sinner will simply be ground down by goodness given enough time. “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Romans 12:21)

The second type of order is conservative. Nothing heals itself. Disorder persists until an exactly opposed remedy is administered to it, and the remedy is dispensed upon willing reception. There is no automatic front of restoration sweeping the cosmos and converting the unwilling in the end. So the physics, rightly understood, predicts nothing whatever about how many are finally saved. It explains how the remedy is made and applied. It is silent on how many present themselves to receive it. And that silence is honest, and it is where the physics must leave us.

This raises the question of where the soul goes who refuses to reside harmoniously in the body of a perfect God. The conservative order forbids deletion. There is no outside of God to exile it to. The sinner cannot stand in the unveiled presence of purity, which would consume the sin and sinner. The answer follows from our understanding of the conditions required to receive Christ’s atonement: the sinner must voluntarily relinquish his attachment to sin.

The disorder remains coupled to whoever bears it. If a soul/person gives his disorder to Christ, then the sin can be cleansed and the soul saved. The cleansing fire is the superimposition of the disorder with its opposite (perfect order). The superimposition of order and its inverse results in the nullification of the flaw/error/disharmony in the soul’s interaction with the rest of the body of God/the organization of the DP Sea, the traces of action that disturbed the relationship between the soul and the body-mind/matrix of God.

Regarding eliminating sin/disharmony by applying good to bad. That may be how atonement works. “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good. (Romans 12:21). The Son, applying the energy/order/organization of good to the disorder of evil, superimposes harmony on disharmony, order on disorder, causing the disharmony to cease to be. Good, in overcoming evil, does not move or hide sin but cancels it. In this model, the superimposition of harmony over disharmony renders it nonexistent. This is illustrated in the experiment in which two wave generators at opposite ends of a tank produce waves that are 180 degrees out of phase; the opposite-phase waves pass through each other, superimpose, and cancel. When a wave crest meets its trough, it leaves still water. “As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.” (Psalm 103:12).

The problem with unconfessed sin, and a heart rebelling against submitting to His will and not giving that sin to Him then bears it still — every man shall bear his own burden (Galatians 6:5). In this model, Hell needs no geography. Perhaps hell is a condition, not a place. Hell may be a soul holding its own uncancelled disorder. If so, then hell can last for eternity if a man refuses to confess, renouce/repent, and accept the gift of His atonement and reconciliation.

This model of the spiritual-physical world explains why it is impossible for a man to do enough good works to cancel his sin. All sins occur along the timeline of history, and all acts radiate into the Dipole Sea, the Sea of Conscious Points in which we live. Because of the timing, following our bad acts, our good acts can never affect the ripples we have already made in the substance of the universe. To cancel the bad/evil/disarmonious acts with good acts is impossible because there is a time barrier between the disorder produced by the bad acts and the good acts.

If we do not repent and accept Christ’s atonement, the torment/disharmony/separation produced by our sin may endure.  We can only hope for an ultimate reconciliation. How long that will take, we cannot be certain. The only certainty is that God desires that we reconcile. “And, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven.” (Colossians 1:20)

There are threads in Scripture that lean toward a wider hope than the tradition usually grants. I hold them as hope. But I will not preach them as a promise. I think God Himself left them as hints rather than headlines. A promise of certain final rescue, published and leaned upon, would abort the very transformation the whole play of creation exists to produce: love and obedience to His Way, given freely. A man who is told he will certainly arrive in Paradise without his discipline of learning Christ’s Way has been given a reason never to set out.

So I hold the hope quietly. I preach the open door and the real cliff, because that is what love does for a soul still able to choose. The Judge is exactly fair — of that I am certain — and the verdict is His to render and not mine to publish. Our task is not to settle the edge cases from the outside. It is to pull the sheep from the cliff.

Part V — Seeing in Part, and the Freedom to Refuse

Why even the physics will not lift the veil

The Conscious Point Physics (CPP) is a theoretical framework that is meant to give evidence of a Designer. The goal of CPP is to derive the whole of physics from the postulate of a geometric grid of Conscious Points serving as markers of space, and four types of Conscious Points that interact according to rules, that produce all physical phenomena (gravity, inertia, energy, particles, fields, Dark Matter, relativity, quantum mechanics, and cosmology – Big Bang, inflation, Dark Energy, chirality…). In the current stage of development of CPP, the above have been described with varying degrees of completeness using 9 Axiomatic assumptions of existence (i.e., the markers of space and points of consciousness and their force-distance relationship).

The point of this effort is to produce a framework for the theoretical unification of all phenomena, so axiomatically simple and logically connected to experimental observation and sensory experience of the physical world that the assumption of God’s existence is logically implied as the simplest explanation for all physical phenomena and existence.

The question is then, does CPP not tear the very veil we said love requires? For we said a God known with unavoidably certain clarity and knowledge of His existence, beauty, and consequence of obedience and disobedience of His Law would be obeyed as gravity is obeyed. Alternatively, there is no meaningful free will in the situation with a gunman who vows to shoot with even the most minor disobedience of his commands. Such certainty of consequence and identity leaves no room left for the choice to express our love for God by following His precepts. With certain knowledge of the consequences of sin (violation of perfect obedience to His Way) is death; such consequences known with certainty make the expression of love out of free will impossible. God cannot know that He is loved for His beauty, that we are of like mind and heart and resonate with Him and desire to live and be with Him in eternity as co-residents of His world. He cannot be sure we love Him, and we cannot express our love in a way that is distinguishable from deception and pretending affection. Love cannot be fulfilled or experienced in a satisfying way for lover or loved in a world without the expression of free will.

The question is, does the physics theory, CPP, make love impossible to be experienced because His identity and His consequences are so clear as to be unavoidably obvious? In short, if the physics makes God plain, does it not abolish the freedom to refuse Him and, that in turn, abolish love?

The Answer: The objection to the clarity that  CPP can provide assumes that the physics can produce absolute certainty about God’s existence. It cannot. Every conclusion this framework could ever reach about God is inductive. That is, every design feature is consistent with the postulate of a creator God. The problem with induction is that proof requires checking all possibilities and showing that they all, without exception, prove God’s existence.

The simplicity of explaining all phenomena with nine axioms satisfies  Occam’s Razor, which states that the simplest explanation is usually the correct explanation. This is strong qualitative evidence for God’s commands being the governing standard behind all the Conscious Points, but it is not proof.  The idea that God is the single consciousness underlying all consciousness is another restatement of this simplicity. As is the idea that the entire creation is dependent upon a primitive consciousness, and that consciousness is God.

The argument for God by the CPP is based on elegance and fit. It is based upon God’s self-created existence as the final unprovable axiom, the single assumption that there is a Sustainer underneath the creation. Having stated the axiom, the arguments showing connection between assumption and all phenomena, regardless of how overwhelming the odds are that the conclusion is correct, the fact that all phenomena cannot be examined leaves a hair’s breadth of uncertainty.

The level of consistent proof in terms of modeling and experimental concillience can make unbelief unreasonable, but it cannot make unbelief impossible. A demonstrated God would compel, as gravity compels a falling stone. A well-evidenced God still waits for our willing assent to His standards as the rule of our lives. So the veil is not torn away. CPP, seen through the eyes of Renaissance-Ministries’ framing, makes it easy to see the shape of God. But the distance between that thin veil and unveiled presence is sufficient to allow human freedom. For now we see through a glass, darkly (1 Corinthians 13:12): Paul does not promise the glass will be removed in this age. The consistency of the experimental evidence with the postulates of CPP implies the existence of God. The underlying singularity of all consciousness through the Nexus, the timing pulse, argues persuasively for His omnipresence. The implications of a mind from which all matter composes imply a God with omniscience.  His oneness and sustaining power of His mind over existence imply omnipotence executed by thought and will. The omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence imply a God to whom worship, respect, and awe are the only rational response. Having grasped the gravity of the implications of the CPP framing of the universe, we mere mortals are faced with the decision to bridge the final microscopic gap between evidence and reason to the certainty of fact with faith. We still must deny our flesh and follow His Way. We must still submit our will to His Way/Person/Character as our unalloyed offering of self. We must still express our love by our total obedience to His Way with hearts that strive to continue to purify the doubt. We must move toward duplicating His Way in our hearts, minds, and bodies.

What Q6 forbids is deductive certainty; what the physics supplies is inductive weight; and these do not collide. The freedom to refuse to comply with the Way of Christ is preserved despite the CPP framework’s logical and evidentiary success. “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.
Corrupt are they, and have done abominable iniquity:
there is none that doeth good.” (Psalm 53:1)

The rebels may continue to refuse.

• The hardened hearts, those addicted to the transient pleasures of sin, can continue to deny.
• The tradition-bound may refuse because comprehension requires the breaking of an idol of the past, the older picture, that had become worshipped.
• Perhaps it is the pride or shame of admitting error and the requirement to apologize to those they misled. Perhaps it is the monetary loss that comes from the sale of idols to the old God of atheistic science.
• The lazy may decline to look.  “As the door turneth upon his hinges, so doth the slothful upon his bed.”  (Proverbs 26:14)“A slothful man hideth his hand in his bosom, and will not so much as bring it to his mouth again.” (Proverbs 19:24)
• The self-serving may set an absolute aside because a self-made morality suits them better.

There is a hair’s breadth of doubt in every perception and every chain of evidence. Men who wish to may live in that breadth their whole lives and can find justification for their chosen rationality. It requires generalization, deletion, and distortion, but evidence and rationality can be massaged sufficiently to give the fig leaf of reason to even the most perverse justification of action.

Renaissance Ministries places the CPP framework side by side with the Bible. The metaphors of the Bible are clearly seen reflected in the physics of the creation. The two speak from the same underlying reality, using different vocabularies, and focusing on different scales. The hardness of heart is the one true power that man possesses. God, Christ, and Holy Spirit will never violate the sanctity of the man’s heart. At any time, a man may choose to see, to open his heart to the evidence of God’s presence. It is possible to rationalize God’s existence and a world with hunger, war, and misguided chauvinism toward a religion that is true at its base, but is used as a vehicle for the satisfaction of the baser impulses of man such as power, fame, respect, and money. The tribal drive is consistent with the fact of religious expansion and imposition, but the pandering to the satisfaction of the flesh using religion, God, and the sacred does not change the truth of the underlying holiness. The hardness of a heart and the blindness of an eye will only result when the individual chooses freely to bend his knee. That choice, that surrender of will, that full love for our Creator God, only comes for some after being salted with much fire. But such is encountered only in the path of each soul’s choosing.

I do not know how far we are from the days when we shall see him as he is with unveiled glory. “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be:
but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2). For me, the evidence of the CPP revelation seems consistent with those days. It feels to me like a preparation for the lifting of the veil. Scripture says that in the days of the voice of the seventh angel… the mystery of God should be finished. (Revelation 10:7). There is a time set for the mystery to be known, and if the Lord should choose to use the CPP framework as an instrument to prepare the church for His return, I believe we can use this tool to help accomplish His purposes. “That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.” (Ephesians 5:27). The CPP paradigm, even in its most elementary presentation, is a tool by which the veil can be thinned. There was a time when concealment was necessary, but if this is the time for the fulfillment of His plan, then I believe we have a powerful tool to take the blinders from the captives. The delusion is strong with a culture-wide myth of man as God, God as the creation of man, God is dead, material as eternal, evolution as the cause, relativity as the standard of morality, self as sovereign, satisfaction of the flesh as our right. It is time to labor toward the harvest of souls. The argument from induction is not the strongest, but it is the best we have. It’s good enough to convince us of the certainty of gravity and taxes; it has adequate power to grind even the most hardened heart into indefensible powder. The argument from induction eventually moves from controversy to common knowledge. It is only necessary to present the fact of the consistency of CPP with every physical phenomenon. There is a great deal of work between that goal and today’s reality, but it will eventually arrive. Seeing the reality of that day, when every soul knows with inductive certainty of God’s existence, does not require the gift of prophecy; it requires only seeing the times and seasons. There is no dated claim; we do not know the hour or the day of His return, but we are to work while it is day, and with CPP as a witnessing tool, I believe the sun will be moving toward midday brightness. Our reading of Revelation, that He will return and make all things new, motivates our labor. Given CPP’s role as an inductive tool, its incorporation of the best empirical tools of Conventional Science, and its compliance with the Scientific Method and protocols of Science, the argument for God’s existence is at least as strong as the Scientific Establishment’s argument for a material-only universe. Our argument for faith is the same as the Materialists’ argument for causeless eternal matter. The difference is hope. With the Materialists’ argument, there is only today. With the CPP argument, there is the hope of a world without end.

Faith, then, is not certainty

It has been said that the test of one’s faith in a concept, idea, or fact is the ability to state it clearly; stumbling over the explanation shows incomplete belief. It is a reasonable thought, but untrue. Such a standard measures articulacy, which is the map, not the territory on which one is walking. A child in a loving home cannot expound the theory of attachment and trusts more truly than the scholar who can. Faith is not the precision of your description of the ground; it is the adequacy of certainty that the direction of walking is toward the destination. The great examples of faith are almost never examples of certainty: Abraham went out, not knowing whither he went (Hebrews 11:8) — no map, only a direction; the woman with the issue of blood had no doctrine of healing, only an orientation; she moved in the direction as she was moved; Peter walked on the water until he began to analyze the wind, and analysis sank him.

So the standard is not certainty but adequate certainty — enough to act on, never enough to remove all doubt or risk. Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief (Mark 9:24) is not the deficient case; it is the ordinary condition of a living faith. And the order runs the way we least expect: understanding does not come first and obedience follow; obedience comes first, and understanding follows — if any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine (John 7:17). You do not reason your way to the threshold and then step across; you step, and the knowing arrives in the walking. Doubt, on this seeing, is often the sign of a living faith rather than a dying one — the noise in a signal that is still being received, the mind still honestly perceiving and updating. The soul that has banished all doubt may simply have stopped listening. A settled reading of God can go stale while it feels most sure. Still, faith without evidence can be foolishness. A lack of faith regardless of the evidence is a hardened heart. Doubt is a live signal only so long as it keeps you moving in the exploration of Truth. One need never be concerned about blind faith. Doubt motivates exploration; it uncovers flaws in reasoning; it prevents us from blindly following a blind man into the ditch. But doubt held as an end in itself is a false religion, a god in and of itself, one which must be overcome by doubting in doubt. Doubt is the religion of last resort, the appearance of the open-minded seeker which holds itself superior to all other “closed-minded religionists.” When in fact the permanent doubter will never reach the destination of Truth, which can only be reached by a continual walking in the direction of the evidence of Truth. The path of the eternal seeker will end only at the destination of more seeking, as that is its orientation; faith in seeking as Truth produces only seeking. Cultivated as a permanent excuse, proof against all evidence of an eternal pattern which should be explored as the absolute truth, it is not an explorer looking for truth; it is evidence of an explorer committed to exploring.

Closing: what we may say, and what we must leave with God

We live in exactly the kind of world that would require a cross. A God whose nature is love had to make souls who could freely love or refuse Him; that freedom made evil genuinely possible; evil, in a conservative order, cannot heal itself and cannot coexist with the purity that is God’s organized nature; and so the disorder had to be answered by an exactly opposed remedy, generated at a cost no creature could pay. Christ generated it — bearing our liability without our stain, transparent to the wrath as light through clear glass, His innocence the reason He survived and our imputed standing the reason it availed. The remedy He generated by His sacrifice into His creation is sufficient for the whole world; it can be applied to each soul upon its willing reception; it is a pattern and not a stock, and so it never runs out; and He lives to administer it. Nothing was waived; the debt of death and disorder wrecked on God’s creation was discharged in the coin of His own suffering. And its reach across all time is not a ripple through the centuries but a keystone under the whole arch of history, one ledger kept in the forbearance of God and settled once at the middle of the story.

Developing an evermore articulated view of the causal connection between CPP and the Holy Bible is the end goal of reasoning; it is not gospel. The CPP-Renaissance connection is a memory device, a plausible explanation, and a segue that establishes a consistent link between the principles of the Bible and Science. CPP is a bridge, a language of science that engages experimental evidence and connects it to Biblical revelation. There is a wide gap between the two domains, and I do not pretend to be the prophet who gives the perfect explanation of the connection between ground and sky, heaven and earth. The physics is largely silent on the specificity of morality, and the Scriptures are largely mute on the specificity of the mechanisms of the physical world. But there is a hint of overlap. The primary one being that God is, and He is One. The determinism of physics conflicts with the sovereignty of the theology. I believe CPP will be a tool for bearing witness to and defending the faith. The arguments are being assembled on the Renaissance site; they will be illustrated and made ever more pedagogically friendly. The key to the witness will be the lives lived, and that will only be true if those who hear the message engage the argument and apply the logic of the words to action. The action is a commitment to walking toward sanctification and perfection of character, living as Christ did, making Him Lord of my flesh/passions/desires, feeding on the Word daily, praying for specific requests, and serving widows and orphans in both the metaphorical and literal sense.

I believe we will see God’s mystery revealed, but I do not know the day and time. It is my hope that CPP will be a tool that will help some to overcome the doubt, to commit to the revelation that God is, that the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross was meaningful and relevant to life, and that His way is justifiably The Way, rather than a way. I believe the Biblical revelation is sufficient; it does not need CPP to be effective. It has moved the hearts of 1.8 billion people who call themselves by His name. I offer CPP as a crutch for the doubting Thomas; it is what I needed. It is the diary of my journey of faith toward certainty and a refinement of my understanding of the journey toward sanctification/becoming like Him. I believe the Bible is sufficient, and I believe this revelation is God’s will, which has driven me for over 39 years to document what I was initiated into in a few moments. I believe we must actively pursue holiness, becoming like Him to fully realize our potential. Seeking, but in the direction where there is absolute truth, is the most profitable, and committing to go ever-deeper in the breadth and depth of that truth. Reception of His invitation to holiness, sanctification, being like Him, is genuinely asked of us, and refusal is genuinely possible, and the verdict on those who finally refuse belongs to a Judge who is exactly fair and to no one else. Our part is neither to prove God so plainly that no one could refuse Him. This is obvious and trivial. We could not if we tried. It is not ours to settle from the outside who is finally lost. Our part is to see the architecture of His creation clearly enough to worship and to pursue being like Him in our thought, speech, and action. It is our job to walk the path that He illuminated, and to pull every sheep we can reach back from the edge of the cliff.

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face (1 Corinthians 13:13, 12). We see in part. We were never promised more than that in this age. And it is enough to walk by, and enough to love by, and enough to bring another with us toward the day the glass comes clear.

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King. 1 Chronicles 12:38